


end of an era

by stargirls



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, also my first time writing any of these idiots so please be gentle, i'll post this thing as a pilot and see where it goes from there!, the debate team au no one wanted nor needed, this is MASSIVELY self-indulgent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-02-02 05:23:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12720483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stargirls/pseuds/stargirls
Summary: It’s senior year for the Neverwinter Speech and Debate Team, and Lup has more than a few things on her mind. If she did have a to-do list, which she doesn’t, because that’s some nerdy shit, it would read as follows:1. Have a kickass senior year.2. Recruit some newbies for the NSDT.3. Smooch her boyfriend’s fucking brains out.4. Show those fools at sectionals how it’s done.





	1. a second annual something

**Author's Note:**

> ya girl has fallen head over heels for the adventure zone.
> 
> so what do i do but write an enormously self-indulgent modern au in which i can project my experiences and niche interests onto my favorite characters? i'm getting way too predictable at this point. consider this the pilot chapter of a potentially ongoing fic—i'm putting it out there to test the waters, and we'll see how things go!
> 
> (it's my first time writing these nerds, so please be gentle! thanks!)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lup gets back into the groove. Lucretia makes a plan. The NSDT has its second meeting of the year.

“I mean, uh… I wanted to start off with an anecdote, but—”

“Dude,” says Lup. “Stop. How are you going to tie anything from your life into something like ethics of international trade and commerce?”

“No, no,” Taako interrupts. He’s lounging atop a few pushed-together desks, manicured finger hovering lazily over the screen of his tablet, mouth twitched up in a smirk. “No, it’d be like— _Hi, my name is Magnus, and one time I bought a sweatshirt that said ‘Made in China,’ and it really turned my life around_ —”

“Shut the fuck up!” Magnus protests, as Taako dissolves into giggles. Lup can’t suppress a snort, but she pulls the straightest face she can and pounds the desk to catch Magnus’s attention again. “Over here, big guy,” she says. “Look, if you think you can do it, fuckin’ do it. But the judges’ve already seen that from you, y’know? You've got more in you than just anecdotes.”

He really does. The Dog Monologue, as they’ve started to refer to it, was only the first of his pieces to bring the audience to tears. Magnus sighs. “Okay,” he says, and leans back. “Maybe I could, uh… start off with a really shocking statistic? Everybody loves a good statistic.”

“Cliché,” says Lup, at the same time Lucretia says from behind them, “Overdone.” They both look at each other, and Lup holds up her hand for a high-five. Lucretia indulges her.

“Get creative,” she advises, as she stands up from the table. “There’s _so much_ on this topic, you just gotta know where to look. Hey, babe?”

Across the room, Barry’s slouching with his feet up on a chair next to Taako, scanning over something intently. He looks up and flushes when she calls. “Yeah?”

“Help Magnus with this international ethics stuff, will ya? I have to get to work.”

He nods, and adjusts his glasses as he gets to his feet. Lup puts an unconscious hand to her own frames. Unlike his, which are dark and boxy, hers are large and round and gold, and she usually doesn’t wear them but today she isn’t feeling the contacts. Besides, it contributes to the aesthetic, as her brother would say. They’re a bunch of nerds sitting in an empty classroom after school, talking about world issues and debate. Somebody has to be wearing glasses, and Barry doesn’t count—he’s a nerd by birthright—so today it’s her.

The only other person wearing glasses in the room is Merle, and he doesn’t count, either, because Lup’s fairly sure teachers aren’t allowed to have 20/20 vision. Right now, he’s seated behind the desk in another corner of the room, reclined in its shitty matching chair, thumbing through the pages of a gardening magazine. He’d looked up just twice so far—once to chuckle at a lewd joke Magnus had made, once to supply a word Taako couldn’t remember (the word had been _prestidigitation_ ). The bright red baseball cap perched jauntily atop his head reads _Ask Lucretia_ , a gag gift that really isn’t that much of a gag. Before they’d scared off the students who had tried to join them at the beginning of the year, freshmen and sophomores kept wandering up to him, full of questions and concerns and parent-related inquiries. He'd just trapped them in his sharp, perpetually amused gaze and said, “Do I look like the team president? Ask Lucretia.” And thus the catchphrase was born.

The president herself is now standing in front of Lup, smiling idly at Magnus’s concentration as he and Barry pour over Barry’s tablet together. Lup reclines against the back of the chair and quirks an eyebrow. “What’s going on, Madam Valedictorian?”

She flushes. “I’m not—”

“Yes, you are,” says Lup; “or you’re _gonna_ be, everyone knows it. So. What’s going on?”

Lucretia, still pink, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Just checking in. You _are_ planning on entering this one, right?”

“Oh, hell yeah,” comes the immediate response, and Lup hears her brother echo with a _Hell yeah!_ behind her. “I was thinking about doing policy debate this time, maybe take down some fools who still believe in the gender binary? You know the drill.”

“Oh my _God_ , Lu,” Taako interjects from behind them. “You shoulda heard this dipshit from one’a my events last time around. He got into it with this other kid about, fuckin’… heterophobia, or somethin’ like that. I wanted to die. I _actually_ wanted to die.”

“What’s his name?” says Lup, coolly. “I’ll beat the shit out of him.”

“I dunno. Harvey or some basic-ass white boy name like that. My point is, take the shot.” He folds his hand into a finger gun, bracelets jangling, then goes back to checking over whatever is on his tablet.

Lucretia sighs. “Please don’t actually—”

“I won’t,” Lup promises, and then, “probably. Anyway, yeah, that’s the plan.”

That is the plan. The plan is also to crush it, which she usually has no problem doing, because she’s been doing it for three years now and she has no intention of breaking her streak. Besides, she’s as much needed here as she is out on the field. No one would look at the lean, five-foot-seven star athlete and take her for a debater, but here she is, at the second meeting of the year for the Neverwinter Speech and Debate Team. They’re in one of the only classrooms they’ve ever been able to commandeer; this year, it’s one of the nice ones, with a set of large windows overlooking the quad and framed by vibrant orange-and-red trees. It’s a far cry from the basement labs they had started out in, which were cold and dismal and harbored some truly terrifying spiders. (All school basements contained a few ungodly creatures, of course, and theirs was no exception. They suspected one of the school’s German teachers, who had a few rather beloved pet arachnids. The theory was that one had escaped and bred with a genetic mutation living in the air conditioner.)

The NSDT is a ragtag group, for sure. They’d all started out as freshmen, young and sleep-deprived and looking for an extracurricular to put on their college application, and become a family purely by accident. But that’s what they are, Lup thinks, sparing a glance around the room. She and Taako, her spontaneous, glamorous twin; Lucretia, a skilled artist and their perpetually overtired president; Magnus, the club’s resident dog lover and master of emotional speeches; the currently absent Davenport, their expert in speech and debate and Merle’s long-suffering partner; and Merle and his magazines and mysterious eyepatch. He tells students it happened in the same accident that claimed his right arm. That’s all he ever says about it, but ideas run wild—a Faustian bargain, a gardening mishap, a run-in with a troupe of organ harvesters. Whenever students confront him with their hypotheses, he shrugs and says, “All of the above?”

Lup realizes with a start that she’s been spacing out. She blinks and clears the glass from her eyes just as Lucretia says, “… and really focus on recruiting this year.”

“Oh,” she says. “I totally was not listening to any of that. Sorry, Luce.”

The president arches an eyebrow, which is usually enough to kill anyone (including Lup) on sight, but luckily she doesn't comment. “I’ve just been thinking since our last meeting. You know, after we graduate, there won’t be anyone left in the club, and I want to make sure it sticks around after we leave.”

Lup blinks. “Yeah, sure.”

“So I just wanted to mention to you—and Taako, too, I guess, just ask that you spread the word. Find people who are interested. Preferably the freshmen, who don’t know that we’re, a, ah…” Lucretia trails off and rubs the back of her neck. “An _exclusive_ group, so to speak.”

That’s an understatement if Lup’s ever heard one. This year, the turnout for the first meeting had been even impressively smaller than the last—two students with bulky coats peered into the doorway, come under the scrutiny of several practiced glowers, and shrunk back. _Run_ , Taako had mouthed, widening his glitter-accentuated eyes, and they had.

Alright. Understandable.

“Sure thing,” she says, breezily.

Her brother looks up from his tablet again and clicks his tongue. “Taako’s on it, lady. Expand the brand. Word ’a mouth. Let’s do it.”

“You’re gonna bring your cult following, huh?”

He looks both vaguely insulted and pleased, and she know he won’t go as far as to defend his acolytes, but it’s amusing to watch him try and contain his personal offense. Taako’s “groupies,” as Merle refers to them, have no formal name, but in Lup’s opinion they’re one Twitter account short of being a recognized fan group. She sees them from time to time, clustered around him in a gaggle, hanging onto his every word. They’re a constant source of experimental recipe ideas and miscredited quotations—once, Taako had bragged to Lup about convincing a freshman that he’d come up with a sentiment by Aristotle. He’d even introduced a few of them to her, and now she has several dedicated underclassmen fans who come to all of her games and shout eagerly over the crowd.

Of course, Taako’s shameless about the attention, but she knows he’ll never admit how much it means to him. “ _Please_ ,” he lilts, with a fluid roll of his eyes. “I recruit based on talent, not loyalty. If those fools want to join up, I’ll be putting ’em through their paces.”

“Sounds grueling,” says Lucretia. “I love it.”

He winks. “You know it. Hey, someone know the word for when you’re try’na tempt someone to do somethin’, but, like, in an exciting way?”

Lucretia hums. “Entice?”

 _“Entice!”_ Taako’s shout is loud enough to startle Barry’s tablet off his desk. “ _Thank you_ , Luce, you’re the real MVP.”

“No problem.” She turns back to Lup with a lingering grin. “Any chance you want some help on policy research?”

“You kidding? Always.”

* * *

Lup doesn’t want to brag—okay, she does—but she’s really gotten her shit together since freshman year.

Namely, she’s won four speech and debate events (three debate, one speech, because she does have an undeniable penchant for arguing), figured out her major (physical chemistry, after she’d almost lit the science lab on fire twice and fallen in love), and learned to drive (her driving instructor swears on his life he doesn’t know how she got her license, and she prefers to leave it up to his imagination). She has herself a kickass boyfriend, a group of ride-or-die friends, and the captainship for the school’s lacrosse team, as well as a solid reputation for track and field. Freshman year Lup wouldn’t stand a chance.

(Of course, she maintains that facing herself at any age would result in a dead heat, but when it comes to general impressiveness and organization, senior year Lup’s pretty sure she’s got this one in the bag.)

So it’s really no surprise that as far as school goes, she’s feeling pretty Zen. It’s a weird feeling for someone who’s fairly sure that her stresses show a little too outwardly—Taako tells her she taps her fingers and jiggles her leg and rakes her hands through her hair. But she likes it. She could get into it. This won’t be a stress-free year (when is it ever, really?) but she’s enjoying where it’s going so far.

Particularly because of Barry.

Barry, her beautiful numbskull of a boyfriend, who had twiddled his thumbs for the first two and a half years they had known each other until Lup, on an impulse, had asked him out after one of their competitions. Barry, whose last name is decidedly not _Bluejeans_ but seems to respond to it just as readily as his actual surname, because it was a long-standing nickname from his middle school years. Barry, who gets just a little too excited over dissections, who’s full of random trivia about the occult, who had worn those stupid glasses just about every day for his natural life. Whenever Lup glances in his direction, she finds herself lingering on his dorky smile and slightly mussed hair, and whatever variation of a white t-shirt he’s sporting that day. He’s shy but sincere, perpetually anxious, _mad_ smart, and Lup is head over heels. She will, of course, admit this over multiple dead bodies, but God—he has her whipped.

This is what she finds herself doing when she steps off an unexpected curb and nearly falls flat on her face. Magnus reaches out to grab her by the elbow with a tiny “Whoa, there!” and she hops it off, trying to regain her balance. She doesn’t even have to look to know that Taako’s mouth is curled in a tiny smirk. “Someone on your mind?” he sing-songs.

“Just thinking about how to kick your ass at the mock,” she shoots back.

“How’re you planning to do that when that curb just nearly fuckin’ wrecked you?”

She flips him off and spins to face the rest of the group—they’ve congealed in the parking lot in front of Neverwinter High’s imposing double doors. Lucretia claps her hands together. “You know the drill, people,” she says. “First mock is this Friday for—”

A chorus of groaning and complaining goes up from the small assembly. “ _Really?_ ” Magnus interrupts, at the same time Merle heaves an enormous sigh. “I had plans, Luce!”

Taako’s smirk widens as he crooks an eyebrow in Magnus’s direction. “Plans, huh?”

Instantly Merle catches on. It’s not hard to, what with how thick her twin is laying on the suggestion. “I sure hope you and Julia are being sa—”

Magnus groans loudly and claps his hands over his ears. “Nope! Don’t wanna hear it! Don’t wanna know! I’m good!”

“Ew,” Lucretia deadpans. Lup places an elbow on Barry’s head and leans idly as the president goes on. “Friday,” she says, and then to their reluctant sponsor, “Davenport can supervise if you don’t want to.”

Their sponsor offers up another dramatic sigh. “If someone’s gotta look after you dunces, might as well be me. Besides, speech ’n debate is Dav’s whole thing. I’ll leave the uppity bickering to him and you kiddos.”

Lucretia’s eyerolls aren’t really eyerolls; more long, hopeless stares into the sky that plead, _Why me?_ She’s gotten so good at them that once, Lup saw a kid revise his argument after being on the receiving end. “Then we’re all meeting here after school on Friday. Speech people, if you want to workshop your stuff, be ready to do so. I’ll be a stand-in if anyone needs someone to argue with.”

“Luce,” says Lup, “last time you were a stand-in, you made Magnus cry.”

Magnus’s head snaps indignantly in their direction. “She did not!”

“She said your entire argument was built on a logical fallacy, and if you were so sure of its construction, you were no better than its shaky foundation, and then you said you had to check on Steven, and you just left? Dude, we all knew what the fuck was going on—”

“I wasn’t trying to—”

“I didn’t fuckin’ cry, you have no proof!”

“It was actually kinda funny, though.”

Taako inspects his nails and says, “Can we get going, Lulu? I got my hot date—”

“If you call me that one more time,” says Lup, “I’m gonna kick your ass—”

“—and Taako’s gotta freshen up the look, y’know? I mean, this one’s a gem, but it ain’t a life-ruiner.” He glares critically at the layers of delicate gold chain hanging from his beige turtleneck. “I’m not digging the pumpkin spice.”

Lucretia snaps to attention. “Coffee. That reminds me. I need to pick up my coffee. Here, Friday, non-negotiable,” she says, and turns promptly on her heel, flashing a peace sign over her head. “Drive safe, don’t do anything stupid!”

“No promises!” Lup returns, as Magnus pulls out his phone (to call his girlfriend for a ride, presumably) and Merle slings his hands behind his head, starting to saunter off towards his van (they’ve all christened it the Merlemobile, and he pretends to despise it, but Lup knows for a fact the name is on a keychain hanging from his rearview mirror). She tugs at Taako’s elbow and pulls Barry in for a gentle kiss on the forehead—yes, it’s cheesy as hell, but the noise he makes in response is absolutely worth it. “You need a ride home, babe?”

He goes a little bit pink, and she has to smirk. “It really gets tiring, y’know?” she muses, linking her arm in Barry’s. “Being the competent one between you two jokers?”

“You drive like a fuckin’ maniac, Lulu.”

“At least I actually _drive_.”

Barry cracks a smile. “You know I love you,” he says, “but you _do_ drive like a fucking maniac.”

She punches him in the arm—lightly, because he bruises easy—and pulls them towards her car. “You’re supposed to be on my side, here!”

“What kinda boyfriend would I be if I didn’t tell the truth?”

“A lousy-ass one,” says Lup, and yanks him in for a half-embrace as they walk. He’s always warm; _crazy_ warm, like a furnace is heating him from the inside out. She could probably name ten of his quirks right here and now, including some truly embarrassing habits and qualities, but in the moments she keeps them to herself, they’re too sweet to deal with. Tooth-rottingly sweet. Honestly, if someone had told her she'd end up this much of a sap, she’d have punched them in the face. Things change, though. They always do.

Taako takes one look at the two of them, leaning into each other, and gags loudly. “Keep it to yourself!”

“Get in the fuckin’ car,” says Lup, as she takes out her keys. He flounces around to the other side, and she and Barry exchange a look, then burst into quiet giggles. She doesn’t even know what’s so funny. Does it matter? Does it ever, when she’s around him?

 _Ugh_ , she wants to punch _herself_ in the face.

Lup slides into the driver’s seat, jams the key in the ignition, and yanks the stick down to _R_ , then slams the gas and reverses out of the parking lot. She blazes past the Merlemobile and Magnus, who’s still standing on the curb, and leans on the horn as they go by. He jumps, drops his phone, and flips them off.

And she’s laughing a little diabolically as they peel out of the school parking lot and lurch onto the main road, as Taako snickers and flips through stations and trades quips with Barry in the backseat, but God, it’s good to be back.


	2. come rain or shine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lup tries to sleep in. Taako evades more than usual. The NSDT goes out for breakfast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my gosh, people. i was NOT expecting my niche little au to get this much love! consider me surprised, flattered, and absolutely blown away. i’m really passionate about this fic and it makes me super happy that you guys are too.
> 
> that said, updates won’t always be this hasty, but i was excited to write this next installment and it just kind of happened. thank you so much to everyone who’s commented, left kudos, and just been wonderfully supportive in general!

_koko - 6:15 AM  
_ _wakey wakey fruit lups we’re going 2 get breakfast w the crew_

Whoever thought up late-start schools had been a masochist. Quite possibly even worse of a masochist than whoever had invented the 7:30 start time, because 8:30 dangles the prospect of sleeping in over their heads, then strangles it to death and bashes them over the head with it. When Lup reaches for her phone to throw it across the room, she can barely pull her eyes open to check the time. Plenty early. No need for her to get up just yet.

 _koko - 6:18  
_ _hellooooooo? we planned this like last week get ur ass out of bed_

 _koko - 6:20 AM  
_ _don’t make me come in there lulu i stg_

Her phone buzzes again on the floor, but she ignores it, shifting comfortably on her side and burying her face in the pillow. She’s just started to drift off again when something white-hot is pressed to the back of her neck—no, it’s not hot, it’s _cold_ , so fucking cold—and she _shrieks_ , kicks her blankets off as she shoots upright and barely misses her twin, who springs back just in time. His eyeliner is half-finished, eyebrows filled but not contoured, and he has a Ziplock bag filled with ice in his hand.

“Taako, I am going to _fucking_ kill you!”

“You’ll have to catch me first!” he yells, and books it out of her room. Lup stumbles out of bed and curses, pushing her mass of hair out of her face. She steps back, slips on one of her dislodged sheets, and lands next to her phone, which is now lighting up with messages from one of her group chats. It’s still dark outside, and she thinks she can make out rain against the window.

That’s a Tuesday for you.

The weather display says _85 degrees_ , which is hellish for the start of any school year but par for the course in Neverwinter, so Lup picks out a pair of cutoffs and a loose-hanging shirt. She really isn’t in the mood for any complex facial care routines, but she still uses the two soaps lined up on her sink, dutifully puts her contacts in, then adds a touch of mascara. Minimal effort, maximum effect, as Taako would say, even though it’s his usual bullshit—she knows for a fact he has three alarms set to kick off the morning’s makeup regimen. She likes to think she’s pretty good with it when she tries, but it’s no use wearing layers of foundation and highlighter when it’s going to come off in rivulets during gym class anyway. So she settles for the mascara and a bit of gloss to round off that lazily-flawless look.

After the face comes the hair. An ordeal in itself. She considers forcing it into a French braid, but, like always, ends up pulling an elastic around it and saying a quick prayer. Her elastics are comically short-lived; her hair has catapulted enough of them across classrooms to be officially deemed a distraction to the learning process. When she steps back, though, she has to say she’s digging the look itself. Her shirt matches the crimson ombre, which matches the pair of sneakers she picks from her closet. All that’s missing is a—

Snapback. Perfect.

She stalks into the kitchen and fixes Taako, who’s lounging at the island, with a steely glare. “I am going to get you back when you _least_ expect it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I don’t doubt it.” Like her, he’s opted for a summery ensemble in the form of a magenta skirt and off-the-shoulder top, complete with a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses, even though it’s slightly lighter than pitch-black outside. “Can we get _going_ already? I’m dying of hunger over here.”

Lup grabs her backpack from the entrance hall and cocks an eyebrow. “So how was the hot date?”

“Hot,” says Taako, shouldering past her into the garage. “If you move any slower, I’m, I’m gonna crumble into a pile of dust. A pile of starving dust.”

“It’s 6:45, dude.”

“And I woke up over a fuckin’ _hour_ ago. Not my fault you sleep like the dead.”

She rolls her eyes, tosses her backpack in the trunk, and climbs into the driver’s seat. “Where’re we going?”

“The Davy Lamp,” says Taako, slouching into the passenger seat next to her. “That diner place on 11th? Where, uh, where Ren works.”

“Wow,” Lup drawls, as she pulls back into the driveway. “I can’t believe you remember her name.”

“I—every public figure oughta know their fans, right? Besides, I put her name on every Home Ec project I do, why _wouldn’t_ I remember her name?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Calling her just one of Taako’s groupies would be counterintuitive; Ren is the veritable president of their unofficial fanclub. Lup’s met her once or twice—she’s a sweet kid with a surprising aptitude for the physical sciences, particularly chemistry. She’s also Taako’s partner in Home Economics, and he complains about pulling her weight in class, but it’s all talk, as usual. Lup happens to know she makes a mean guacamole and a meaner virgin piña colada, and cooks up formulas in the lab that rival Taako’s in creativity and Lup’s in potential explosive power. Rather unintentionally, Ren brings out a side of Lup’s brother she doesn’t get to see often; who sets aside his knife’s-edge-witticisms and exhibitionist persona to become something that vaguely resembles a mentor. He claims he’s just buttering her up so she’ll write an essay for him when he asks, but Lup knows there’s more to it than that—there always is.

The car’s tires screech as it swerves around the end of the driveway and onto the road. “So. Hot date. Guy I know?”

“You’re only asking in case you need to kick his ass.”

She shrugs. “Guilty. So, do I know ’im or not?”

Taako shoots a glance out the rain-spattered window as they round a corner and lurch towards an intersection. “Nah,” is all he says. “No big deal.”

That’s enough for Lup to actually look at him. He’s never terribly open about anything, although he is outright about everything, but Taako’s relationship with her is no-holds-barred. She can’t remember a time they ever kept secrets from each other—they’re too attuned to each other’s wavelengths for anything to be worth hiding, anyway. Magnus had teased them about “twintuition” (for which she had chased him down with his own tablet), and Lup isn’t keen to admit it, but he’s not far off. She doesn’t know everything running through Taako’s head—no one does, really—but she can get pretty damn close.

And she _knows_ , right now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that something’s up.

It’s too early for this.

“Cool,” she says, and flips on the radio.

The diner is a short drive from the house, but Lup’s exhausted enough to miss a turn and have to double back, so it’s the top of the hour by the time they rumble into the parking lot. The Davy Lamp is small and rundown, but in the way that people like, the way that makes it look lived-in and vintage without really trying. There’s a faded mustard-yellow sign mounted on the roof which proclaims _The world’s best breakfast cocktails!_ and thanks to a little bit of firsthand experience and Ren’s handiness with a mixer, Lup’s confident that it’s not false advertising. They make a run for it and weave their way through rows of packed-together cars, each parked a little worse than the next, and make it to the door just as a gust of wind sends rain careening into their faces. Like the universe really wants to make it that kind of day. As Taako splutters and curses, Lup blinks the raindrops out of her eyes and pushes blindly into the restaurant.

They make it inside by something that falls just short of a miracle. A wall of air conditioning envelops them immediately, blowing back damp strands from Lup’s face, and she has to squint to regain her bearings. She instantly recognizes the slightly waterlogged NSDT huddled around a table near the window, and waves off the hostess, who’s started to advance from the rickety wooden counter up front. Towing a wilted Taako behind her, she makes her way over to the group, collapses into the seat next to Barry and almost startles him out of his skin, and says, “Coffee.”

Lucretia slides her a Turkish black. “Double-shot,” she says.

“You’re a godsend, babe.”

Taking the first sip of coffee is remembering what it means to be human. Lup takes a long gulp and sighs, then leans over to kiss Barry’s cheek. “Morning.”

“Morning,” he says, and that smile really just tugs at the heartstrings, doesn’t it? He tucks his hand in hers under the table, and she grins back at him over the coffee, because here are two of her favorite things in the whole world, right here. Turkish black, of course, but also Barry in his dumb science pun t-shirt and characteristic blue jeans, glasses slightly fogged with condensation—he always forgets to clean them. She plucks them off his face, rubs them on the hem of her shirt, then carefully replaces them. “You’re a disaster,” she whispers, affection blooming in her chest.

“I know,” he whispers back.

Magnus, who had been mid-sip on their arrival, sets down a mug of what Lup assumes is tea and says, “Holy fuck, you guys are drenched!”

“No shit.” Taako unceremoniously wrings out his braid and splatters water across the vinyl. “What kinda weather is this?”

Out of their sorry-looking group, Lup notices, Lucretia is the only one who looks remotely dry. “The kind that’s in the forecast,” she deadpans, and Magnus snickers. “Am I the only one who owns an umbrella?”

Barry gestures a little helplessly to the five of them. “I dunno if you’ve noticed, but we don’t exactly have it together.”

“Speak for yourself,” Lup snorts, at the same time Taako raises a finger and says, “Um, I’ve got it _all_ together, Barold.” They glance at each other and high-five in unison.

“Anyway,” her twin continues, “I’m gonna fuckin’ die for real if we don’t get some food up in here. Let’s _go_ , people.”

They order—vegetarian dishes for Lup and Taako, a sunny-side-up and grits for Barry, an English muffin for Lucretia, the four-egg special for Magnus. The latter has friends in the kitchen (although he insists it’s his “rustic hospitality”), which means despite the fact that the diner is full to bursting, a waiter shows up with their breakfast shortly after. By that time, of course, their conversation has jumped from Magnus’s dogs to the scandalous whereabouts of a young geometry teacher to exactly how acceptable it is to modify the ingredients in a ham sandwich. The jury’s still out when their plates are carted over on two large trays.

“Look, I can’t help it if homeboy’s taste buds are broken, he doesn’t know turkey from tissue paper—”

“Mags,” says Lup, eyeing the stack of eggs on Magnus’s enormous plate, “that’s _kind_ of revolting.”

“Lup, please,” Lucretia interjects. “How else is he supposed to get yolked?”

Complete silence falls over the table. Magnus snorts—that’s what does it—and then everyone dissolves into quiet hysterics. Lup pulls her best _You-make-me-want-to-die_ face. (It isn’t terribly effective, because she’s giggling about as hard as everybody else.) Next to her, Barry has to take his glasses off to blink tears out of his eyes.

Their president sits back and holds out her fist for Magnus to bump. “Booyah.”

“Holy Christ,” Taako gasps. “Never, _ever_ say that again.”

“Just doing my part to keep you all on your toes.” She takes a serene sip of whatever monstrous double-shot concoction is in her cup. “Just saying, though, I don’t know if anyone else is going to be able to make a pun for the rest of the year, because that one set the bar pretty high.”

“The _breakfast_ bar?” says Barry, grinning, but Lup just puts a gentle hand on his shoulder and says, “No.”

Magnus spears a bit of egg with his fork.“I dunno, Luce. That was pretty good, but Merle’s gonna get you on the ropes eventually.”

“Are we—are we seriously just forgetting about Davenport?” Taako taps the edge of a bedazzled acrylic against his plate. “Does _anyone_ remember the drive to district finals last year?”

“ ‘Are we there yet?’ ” Lup mocks.

The rest of the group joins in. “ ‘No, we’re the Neverwinter Speech and Debate Team.’ ”

They’d all pleaded with Merle to get his husband to stop, but he’d only joined in and tortured them with wildly inappropriate uses of outdated slang, including several comments on how “lit” the competition was going to be, and how they had better do their best, because “WOLO” (We Only Live Once, he had explained, over a cacophony of groans and begging). By the time they’d pulled into the parking lot, Lup had stolen Barry’s sweatshirt and wrapped it around her head, and Magnus insisted his ears were bleeding. The drive back home had been just as bad, if not worse.

Lucretia tips her head, conceding. “Alright, okay. But if those two want to out-pun me, I’m not going down without a fight.”

“Fuck yeah,” says Magnus, and they fist-bump again.

They settle into a comfortable silence as everyone digs into their food the way only high school seniors can, like it’s the last of their money and they’re making the most of it (which, to be fair, is an astute observation, because their combined salaries from the last month are just barely enough to cover this particular indulgence). Lup offers Barry a bit of avocado, which devolves quickly into the table cheering him on as he spears it with a piece of bacon and downs it in one go. With the exception of Magnus’s morbid fascination, they’re all thoroughly disgusted, but he just chews and swallows thoughtfully. “It just doesn’t taste like much,” is all he says. “Texture’s interesting, though.”

After Lup orders her second coffee and the last of Barry’s grits are scraped from his bowl, Lucretia says, “Does anyone know for sure what they’re working towards for the district competition?”

“Expository,” says Magnus, shifting eagerly in his seat. “Expository. I think I could really do something with the topic I have. Like, international trade and commerce seemed so _boring_ , but I was reading about it last night, and it’s really interesting, actually. Plus, the judges love that relevant stuff. If I do it right, it’s gonna be kickass.”

“That’s our new motto right there,” Barry interjects. “ ‘If I do it right, it’s gonna be kickass.’ ”

“Amen,” mutters Lucretia. Like Lup, she’s on her second cup of coffee and looking a little more alert, but only just. “I was thinking about giving poetry a try. I’ve never done it before—”

Taako interrupts. “Oho, stop the presses. _Luce’s_ never done this before?”

She turns pink. There’s nothing about Lucretia—ebony-dark, platinum-haired, regal-faced Lucretia—that even _begins_ to hint at her impressive resumé, but Lup knows she has more events under her belt than anyone in the NSDT. “I get it, I get the picture. I just want the experience. And there are some nice pieces out there.”

“Mm-hmm.” Taako’s polished off the last of a plate heaped with strawberries, and now he leans back and rests his elbows at the top of the booth. “Mm-hmm. Listen. Cha’boy’s got somethin’ in mind with a little more pizzazz. I’m thinking I go back to basics, do some improv debate?” He shrugs. “ ’S the last year, so why not?”

“Good point,” says Lucretia, and then Lup’s twin nudges her. “What, uh, what’re you thinking?”

What is she thinking? She’s thinking about how the words _last year_ turn the taste of avocado in her mouth to dust. Even though she knows she’s eaten her fill, her stomach is suddenly hollowed out, and the cozy interior of The Davy Lamp suddenly feels a little too claustrophobic. She’s almost positive it doesn’t show on her face, whatever _it_ is, but it’s there—cold and deep and right out of the wide-open blue. Anyone could mistake the silent seconds that pass for contemplation.

 _Oh, for fuck’s sake,_ snaps the sliver of her brain that isn’t threatening to dissociate out of her skull. _This isn’t the time or the place._

Lup says, “I was thinking about doing some dramatic extemp this year. I dunno when, but it was pretty fun last year, so I figured—why the hell not?”

And right then, she _knows_ she’s made a mistake, still caught up in whatever is eating at her, because Taako leans forward with teasing springloaded in his arched eyebrow and says, “Fun, huh?”

* * *

_It’s a crisp spring morning. Most of them are this time of year; the air is cool and fresh with the promise of life, and when Lup rocks back on her heels, they dig into a cushion of black dirt and vivid sprouts of grass._

_And he’s standing in front of her, searching her face with eyes as blue as the sky behind him, looking for all the world like the answers are hidden in the curve of her upper lip or the freckles that dot her cheeks._

* * *

Magnus snickers. Lucretia smirks. Barry shrinks just slightly into his battered denim jacket.

“Yeah,” Lup says. “Fun.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> barry has hypogeusia, a diminished sense of taste. my boy can eat some weird shit.


	3. making friends...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lup intimidates some underclassmen. Carey scores a goal. The NSDT holds its first official meeting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it should go without saying that i am still so, SO overwhelmed by the sheer amount of love y'all are sending my way. this is the first fic i've written in awhile, and lately it's been hard for me to get enthusiastic about my writing, but i've been having so much fun with this ridiculous au and i hope you are too.
> 
> another huge thanks to everyone who's supported me with kudos, comments, and general hype! enjoy!

“Alright, fools,” says Lup, twirling her stick and driving it into the floor. “Who’s feeling lucky?”

If anyone has fortune on their side, it definitely doesn’t look like the cluster of juniors and seniors at the far wall. They eye Lup and the goal behind her with obvious apprehension—well-deserved, mind you—as they maneuver reluctantly into their positions.

“Yo, Lup!” From where she stands at the center of the court, Carey turns and jerks her head in the other team’s direction. “You’re gonna scare ’em off!”

“They’d be so lucky, babe!” Lup returns.

Their center just rolls her eyes and turns back to the unfortunate soul opposite her. Carey Fangbattle, fellow fourth-year—when they’d first met, Lup had wasted no time complimenting her on her “kickass” name, and they’d been friends ever since. Next to Lup, she’s short but subtly muscled (although, to be fair, everyone looks short next to Lup), and it’s no secret that she’s one of the few who can best Magnus in a wrestling match, especially when there are no holds barred. Underestimating her is a mistake impossible to make twice.

Just to her right, Carey’s girlfriend grins at her quip and taps her stick eagerly against the ground. Killian’s imperious stature and bodybuilder physique means that she would be an obvious choice for offense, but Lup knows there’s no better defensive player around. She’s not so sure when it comes to combat, but she does know that the one time Magnus challenged Killian to an arm-wrestling match, he’d gotten his forearm slammed so hard into the desk that it had nearly toppled over. She and Carey are known at the local gym as “Team Sweet Flips,” which Taako swears had been his idea, and Lup thinks plenty of herself, but not even _she_ is brazen enough to take on their synergy.

Their other defense spins her wheelchair and calls to Carey. Noelle’s halo of red, curly hair gives her the kind of angelic look you wouldn’t attribute to a terrifyingly good athlete, but everyone who knows her from previous years knows she’s just an age division shy of taking the Paralympics by storm. “We playin’ or what?”

“We’re playing!” Carey shouts, and clacks her stick against the other girl’s. They’re one person short today—a boy who can’t help but remind Lup of a praying mantis and sports an insufferably nasally voice—but lingering a few feet away from Carey is Avi, whose thermos of spiked Gatorade is an open secret schoolwide. The team they’re facing off against has all of its players and somehow, they don’t look like anything against Lup’s crew.

“One,” says Carey. “Two, three—!” And she smacks the puck to Avi, who swings the stick wildly and sends it bouncing across the court. With a good-natured roll of her eyes, Carey chases after it.

Under the doleful eye of their teacher, a long-suffering man named Leon, this is third period every day for Lup and a handful of fellow seniors. On the other side of the curtain that divides the gym, she knows Taako and Magnus are facing off against another team; the former examining his nails and tossing the occasional jibe, the latter charging forward and undoubtedly scaring the shit out of the defense. On any other day she’d be doing the same—scaring the shit out of underclassmen is a specialty of hers—but they’d all agreed it was her turn to be goalie. So that’s why she’s poised in front of the goal, knees bent and stick raised, watching Carey dodge and weave with the puck. The defense already looks a little hopeless, and one of them just steps back and watches as she slams it into the goal.

“Hell yeah!” Killian calls from the other end of the court, and Avi echoes with a slightly weaker “Hell yeah!” Lup whistles loudly as everyone traipses back to their starting positions.

They’re five minutes in.

Ten minutes after that, they’ve scored another goal, courtesy of Avi (who claims he doesn’t try at all, but whoops with excitement when he accidentally deflects Carey’s shot into the net). The other team’s goalie is starting to display Lucretia-worthy levels of repressed frustration. They get one over on Killian, who takes the faceoff, but Noelle materializes behind her and smacks the puck all the way across the court. Lup leans over for a high-five, and as she turns back to the goal, she sees a red-faced Leon pulling aside her twin. Taako’s stick is wrong-side up, and he watches innocently as Leon flips it and shows him the proper stance.

“I dunno, my man,” she hears Taako say. His mouth is twitching with barely contained amusement, and he catches Lup watching and tosses her a conspicuous wink. “That just doesn’t look right to me.”

Leon drags a hand down his face. “I _know_ you know this. I’ve seen you play defense. Just show me—no, for God’s sake, _tell me_ how you would normally hold the stick. Just tell me that much.”

Taako snickers. “You want me to explain to you how to play the fuckin’ _game?_ You’re a gym teacher, isn’t this, like, your entire _job?_ It ain’t much, my dude!”

Lup has to hide a smirk as a blood vessel bulges in Leon’s forehead, and turns back to the game at hand, just in time to see Noelle whip her stick and send the puck skittering away from their side of the court. She pulls back on one of her wheels and waves in Lup’s direction. “Hello! Earth to Lup! You still with us?”

“Yeah, yeah, you know it!”

They play a few more rounds, and to Lup’s mixed satisfaction and restless frustration, she defends the goal only once, from a five-foot junior who looks like he spends more time cleaning his Balenciagas than combing his hair. It’s not even defending, really, because he takes one look up at her and takes a full step back, leaving the puck open for her to shoot across the court. She doesn’t blame him; she’s an intimidating presence, especially when it comes to sports. They all know her as the captain of the lacrosse team, among other things, but Lup’s found that games involving large sticks work pretty much the same way. If she wields it right, everyone backs the fuck off. And that’s how she does it.

The whistle sounds a few more goals after that, by another gym teacher who looks and sounds like he’d been recruited off the set of Saturday Night Lights, and Carey, Killian, and Noelle meet each other mid-court for a high-five. They exchange more high-fives with Lup, and although Avi’s already halfway to the doors, he tosses them a jaunty thumbs-up. The rest of Lup’s team meets Taako and Magnus on the other side of the curtain, and sure enough, Magnus is coated in a thin layer of sweat, clutching his stick like a baseball bat. “We won!” he crows, and Taako claps a hand over his ear.

“Fuckin’ _shit_ ,” he hisses at Magnus. “Hypersensitivity, dude!”

“Sorry, sorry—yeah, we kicked their asses,” Magnus says. “How’d it go, Carey?”

Carey cocks an eyebrow. “You kidding me? We won!”

“Well, _duh_ , but, like…”

They stride ahead the rest of the group, chattering excitedly, and Lup makes no attempt to hide her smile. There’s nothing much about Magnus that suggests _infectiously friendly_ —in fact, his stereotypical jock-ish appearance tends to do the exact opposite until he opens his mouth. Then everyone in the vicinity gets an immediate earful about his two dogs, and his prize-winning fish Steven, and his beautiful girlfriend Julia, and whatever project he’s working on in shop class. He can be brash and reckless and really fucking _stupid_ sometimes, and he’s got plenty of scars to prove it, but he’s also one of the unabashedly nicest people Lup’s ever met. So it wasn’t any surprise that he and Carey had hit it off almost immediately and became sparring partners in their spare time. They’re another duo Lup isn’t too anxious to take on. She’ll never admit that to their faces, of course—she has a reputation to preserve—but they’re in their own school of badassery.

(Lup also suspects Carey is the reason why Magnus has the inexplicable ability to pickpocket, but he hasn’t been able to relieve her of her wallet just yet, so she’s decided to let it slide.)

She bumps Taako’s hip with hers as they deposit their sticks in the rack and spill into the hallway. “One of these days you’re gonna kill that guy, y’know?”

He shoots a glance back at Leon, who’s leaning on a spare stick and watching them leave with exhaustion in every line of his face. “That’s the plan, sis.”

“You ain’t really gonna kill ’im.” Noelle draws up beside them, still short of breath and slightly pink. “But he’s gonna have, like, some kinda aneurysm eventually. He looks like he’s right ready to pop.”

“Yeah, and it’s hilarious.”

“I think you and I might have different definitions of what’s hilarious—”

“I’m just joshin’,” Taako interrupts, with a wave of his hand. “I’m not going to _murder_ the man, Noelle.”

Lup shrugs. “I think another switcheroo just might push him over the edge.”

“Which we _can’t do anymore_ because of your hair—”

“I _told_ you, I did it for the aesthetic—”

—Which isn’t a lie, but she’d had to make some kind of change from freshman year, the year she hadn’t yet discovered that red streaks made her look like the protagonist of a fucking fanfiction. She’d come a long way from freshman year Lup, which was most definitely for the best, but now when she looks back everything looks and sounds like she's viewing it from underwater. She can't fathom a time the NSDT hadn’t been a part of her life, or she hadn’t known what she was passionate about, or college wasn’t a looming shadow over the next stage of her future. Lup isn't too crazy about dwelling in the past, and for good reason; there's shit in the rearview mirror that needs to stay there. But to think about how distant she was from everything at the beginning of high school— _so_ distant, full of empty spaces and static—it's all a little dizzying.

She’s been dwelling more and more, as of late.

* * *

_They sweep into the classroom with the grace and authority of two freshmen who have no clear-cut idea of what they’re doing or why, but have years of experience in bullshitting their way through every situation, and are entirely confident they can do so again without any trouble whatsoever._

_There are four other people in the room._

_Lup plans to observe and analyze all of them in time, but the first soul she lays eyes on is sporting a pair of blocky spectacles and shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He has a folder in front of him with a few worksheets scattered across his desk, and he’s tapping a pencil against the edge of it as he pours over one of the papers intently. The pencil comes to a halt when she pushes the door open, and he meets her eyes almost by accident before snapping his gaze back to the worksheets._

_She nudges Taako and places a completely redundant hand at the side of her mouth to say, just slightly above a stage whisper, “Nerd alert!”_

_One of the other kids in the room gives a loud snort, and the boy flushes, but keeps his eyes on the desk. Lup drops into a chair and props her feet on a desk in front of her, and her twin follows suit, leaning back with a deep sigh. She shoots a look at the teacher in the corner, daring him to say something, but he doesn’t. In fact, he’s not even watching them—he’s perusing on a magazine with an immaculately kept garden on the front cover. His voluminous beard is threaded with flowers. Her glance turns into a skeptical once-over, and after a few seconds, he looks up from his magazine and raises an eyebrow at her. She raises one right back. He gives an amused huff and goes back to reading._

_Alright, so the teacher isn’t a pushover. Looking okay so far._

_It had been near-impossible to decipher the intercom’s crackling, but they’d managed to make out 3:20 as the meeting’s start time, and right now the minute hand on the clock above them is idling at 3:18. Lup surveys the other students in the room—there’s the boy who’d laughed at her quip, and a girl in the far corner of the room, biting her lip in concentration as she scrapes her pencil across something that looks like a sketchbook. The boy has to be in some kind of sports, she thinks. Football or something or other. He’s darkish and even taller than she is, and even under the varsity sweatshirt he’s wearing, she can make out a pretty damn impressive physique. A distinct scar cuts across one of his eyebrows. He probably thinks he’s hot shit, but then again, most of the guys her age do. She won’t hold that against him._

_3:19. The girl in the corner continues to frown down at her sketchbook. Against her complexion, she has a shock of platinum-blonde hair that looks almost white, trimmed in a sophisticated pixie cut that hangs in ringlets down one side of her face. There’s a pair of vibrant white frames perched on the bridge of her nose, which on anyone else would make them look like a traditionalist with a penchant for Sunday morning crosswords, but somehow suit her perfectly. She has a light blue jacket perched over a blue button-up and a matching vest—something else that shouldn’t work as well as it does. She also hasn’t looked up from her sketchbook. Either introverted or dangerous; actually, scratch that, Lup thinks, gazing over at Taako. Sometimes those things can be the same._

_And then there’s the boy. She hesitates to use the word “basic,” but he couldn’t look more starter-Sims-character if he tried. A wavy mop of light brown hair falls across his glasses, and from where she’s sitting she can make out a few pale freckles scattered across his face. His eyes are shockingly blue—like, straight-from-Krypton blue. There’s a NASA logo splashed across the front of the shirt, where she has to give him points for creativity, but just as quickly docks them for the jeans. They’re bootcut, slightly faded, and look like something she could buy at any department store in any town in the world. Maybe it’s because she’s measuring it up against the girl’s dapper-as-fuck ensemble, but she has to say she’s not impressed._

_Next to her, Taako fiddles with his braid and tosses a lazy glance in the clock’s direction just as the second hand creeps back around. 3:20. The girl in the corner sets down her sketchbook, stands up, and paces to the front of the room._

_Okay. Not what Lup had been expecting, but why not?_

_She steeples her fingers and clears her throat. The larger boy looks up from his phone, and NASA kid shuffles his papers into the folder and stuffs it back in his backpack._

_“Thank you all for coming,” she begins. “My name is Lucretia, and this is the first official meeting of the Neverwinter Speech and Debate Team.”_

_“Not much of a team,” Taako comments._

_She doesn’t even glare—she just looks at him, and even though Lup’s not directly in the line of fire, she feels ice settle in her stomach. Lucretia can’t be much older than they are (in fact, she thinks, by the look of it, they’re all freshmen), but she’s got something going for her that most freshmen don’t. Namely, she looks like she has her shit together, and unlike the two of them, she’s not making it up as she goes. And that by itself is terrifying enough to prompt Taako to swallow whatever snark he planned to follow it._

_“You’re right,” says Lucretia. “It isn’t, yet. But we plan to change that. I wanted to start by going around and just getting to know each other, so… I’ll go first.”_

_Icebreakers. God, why did they think extracurriculars were a good idea?_

_It’s a stupid thought to have, because she knows exactly why. It has something to do with the discomfort that suffocates every inch of their house this year; there were days during the lazy months when it got so bad that neither of them could breathe, and then they had to get out of there as fast as they could and find something, anything to do that wasn’t sitting around and languishing in the heat. Summer had been its own kind of hell after the move—their third in two years—and if staying sane meant finding some asinine after school time-waster, they were fully willing to commit. So they’d looked over the crowded webpage of clubs and organizations and completely redundant tutoring programs (“We could do that,” Taako had said; “we’re smart as hell,” and she’d pointed out that they’d have to deal with people less intelligent with them, and that had ended that conversation). After arguing for a bit over the merits of science club versus theatre, they’d realized they were perfectly suited to one of the newest groups around: the NSDT, as the site had called it. “A thrilling foray into the pulse-pounding world of public speaking, debate, and drama.”_

_“Sounds like something for nerds,” was all Taako had to say, sprawled upside-down on her bed._

_“Says you, One-Commercial-Wonder.”_

_“Look, if being on TV isn’t an impressive enough resumé for the fuckin’ drama geeks, what am I supposed to do with my high school career?”_

_So they’re here, listening as Lucretia gives them a brief introduction. She’s a freshman (but doesn't look it), an artist (easy enough to discern), and she’d done debate in middle school, but wanted to continue into high school and asked the administration for permission to start a club. At this point she turns to the teacher, who finally puts down his magazine and gives them a lazy wave. “Mr. Highchurch,” he says, “but you can call me Merle, whatever floats your boat. I teach botany, so I’m sure I’ll see some’a you dunces junior year.”_

_“Merle’s husband is a former debate champion,” says Lucretia, with an inkling of pride in her voice._

_“Yeah, and what am I, chopped liver?”_

_She ignores him. “We’re hoping to have him come in later in the year to talk to us about preparing an argument and things like that. Okay, uh… do you want to go next?”_

_The darkish boy sits up and smiles, and immediately Lup spots his noticeably crooked teeth. Knocked loose, she thinks, just by the look of him. “Magnus Burnsides,” he proclaims, and Merle snorts behind his magazine. Without missing a beat, Magnus swivels around. “Yeah, like ‘Highchurch’ is so much better!”_

_“Actually,” says Merle, through chuckles, “it is.”_

_“Yeah, yeah…” He turns back to the group. “So, uh, I thought I’d give this try. Just thought I’d give it a try. Not really sure what this whole deal is, but it could be cool, so… yeah!”_

_Lup’s lips twitch, and for some reason she can’t keep herself from smiling. He’s amusing, this guy. She could be down with him._

_NASA kid realizes he’s up next, fidgets, and speaks up with a surprisingly gravelly voice. “I’m, uh, Barry,” he says, and falls silent again._

_Well. They can’t all be winners. At the very least, this kid’ll be fun to mess with._

_Lucretia looks expectantly to the two of them._

_“Taako,” her twin drawls. “Y’know, from TV?”_

_In the absence of any reaction, Lup cracks her knuckles and gives a coronation wave to the rest of the room. “No clue what this is about,” she says, “but I’m ready to crush it. I’m Lup. Great to be here.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> consider, for your soul: tiny freshman lup had soft adorable shoulder-length hair. she’d kick your ass for thinking it was cute but it was most definitely cute.


	4. ... and influencing people

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lup survives a Friday. Taako does some recruiting. The NSDT gets ready to rumble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter's a little delayed, and i apologize! i promise y'all that my passion for this fic is as enormous as ever, and i'm really excited for where we get to go next.
> 
> that said, hope everyone's enjoying the start of this candlenights season! i know i am!

The inventor of ninth periods on Friday, Lup decides, had just _colossally_ missed the mark.

It’s an idea right up there with late-start schools. She gets it, she really does—everybody loves a little suspense, and there’d be enough anticipation in the air to bottle up, label, and slap across a Costco storefront. Of course, the road to complete and utter boredom is paved with good intentions, and so for the last several minutes Lup’s been tracking the second hand as it treks around the clock. Under her watchful eye, it seems like it’s moving a little slower than usual (which is fair, because anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of Lup’s glare could tell you it _definitely_ has the power to intimidate abstract concepts), but she suspects it’s the ninth-period-on-Friday effect. That same effect is hard at work drilling her teacher’s voice into her skull, and by the looks of it, the other kids at her table are feeling it too. Brilliant in theory, destructive in practice. She shifts to sit cross-legged and leans back, tuning out the white noise of his lecture as the second hand starts around again.

Sixty _ridiculously_ long seconds later, the bell rings, and Lup leaps out of her seat like she’s been springloaded. She slings her bag over her shoulder, salutes the otherwise pokerfaced teacher, and escapes into the hallway. The first breath of the weekend is always a thrill in itself. She inhales deeply and catches ink, chlorine, and a nauseating flood of cologne and perfume. Lup follows a gaggle of chattering freshmen to a pair of double doors, where students round the bend and stream towards the exits. They turn right. Lup turns left.

She ambles down another hallway, past an enormous mural she recognizes as Lucretia’s work—the student council had commissioned her on her second year to paint something over a crass bit of graffiti. The finished product depicts an enormous crescent moon against a vibrant night sky, but the moon’s surface is ridged, made entirely up of different buildings in Neverwinter. Their school, long and squat, curves in at the center, and Lup recognizes a few houses, including a couple from their own neighborhood. After the mural was unveiled, the NSDT had grilled her for interpretations, intent on goading a straight answer out of their decidedly vague president. She’d just shrugged cryptically and said, cool as a cucumber, “I thought it looked kickass.”

(They’d given up after that because it could have been a deadpan answer, but knowing Lucretia, it could have been completely serious, too.)

When she rounds the corner, there’s Taako, lounging against a row of lockers with an audience of two. Ren’s electric-blue bob reminds her vividly of her freshman days (not something she cares to be reminded of, mind you, but Ren’s earned herself an exception), and the boy next to her is impossible not to recognize—if it’s possible to be famous at the tender age of fourteen, this kid has got it down pat. Angus McDonald, the three-pint prodigy. He’s made more enemies in a year than Lup’s made in three seasons on the lacrosse field, mostly thanks to the fact that he’s mad smart—and tends to accidentally humiliate the gifted program burnouts in his AP classes. He’s also latched onto Taako, who constantly bemoans Angus’s presence and makes a show of dreading their tutoring sessions, but Lup’s listened in on one of his biochem lessons. Angus is undeniably passionate and hangs on to Taako’s every word, and as much as he pretends otherwise, she knows that’s the sort of thing he relies on. Even now, his back is turned to her as she approaches, but she can tell he’s basking in their attention.

“Listen,” she can hear him saying. Taako’s in marketing mode, and rare form, at that. “Even if it’s not in—not in your wheelhouse, I guarantee you, nothing looks better than a meaty extracurricular like debate on the ol’ resumé.”

Angus looks like he’s about to respond, but then he spots Lup, and his face lights up in a smile. “Miss Lup! Hello!”

Lup grins. “Hey there, kiddo.”

She tosses a wave to Ren as she approaches, and Ren returns it in kind; she’s holding a Tupperware container filled with something that smells fucking _amazing_. Taako notices her eyeing it and says, “Like that, huh? Lil’ somethin’-somethin’ we whipped up in class.”

“Fried rice,” Ren chimes in, and smiles to herself.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing, just…” Like Noelle’s, her voice is accented with a sweet Southern lilt, which makes it even more hilarious when she goes off on douchey customers at The Davy Lamp. (Lup’s seen it before and it’s nothing short of glorious.) “You said _we_. Not _I_.”

Taako blinks and recovers in a fraction of a second, but it’s a fraction of a second long enough for Lup to notice. She props a hand on her hip and bites down on a smirk as he continues with his usual bravado. “Look, even rookies need a bit’a credit now ’n then. It’s called _shaping_.”

“That’s a psychology term, sir, and inapplicable in this sit—”

“Anyway!” He claps his hands and drowns out Angus’s hapless attempt to correct him. “Lup and I have to head off, but give it some thought, alright? You’ll never get on our level, but I’m tellin’ you, Neverwinter needs a new generation of debate team stars.”

Ren smiles again in earnest. She’s the kind of person you’d swear was being passive aggressive if you didn’t know how _nice_ she really is, and Lup hopes to God nothing will happen to her to crush that spirit. (The world needs more people like that, she thinks, who are kind just for the hell of it.) “We’ll think about it, Taako, we promise.”

“Yeah, promise!” Angus echoes.

“Cool, cool.” Taako spins on his heel and turns to Lup, tossing his head in the direction of the staircase. “Let’s kick it, sis.”

Angus looks a little antsy—clearly they’ve forgone heading to the bus stop in favor of dwindling in the hallway—and both he and Ren take off at a half-sprint the other way as soon as she and Taako set off. Lup hums once they’re out of earshot. “Recruiting your protégés, huh?”

“President’s orders,” he says, as they traipse up the stairs. “But if you tell anyone those two were my first choice, I swear to God, I’ll take the kid and drive us off a bridge.”

“You don’t even know how to drive.”

“Fuckin’ watch me.”

The NSDT is already assembled when they arrive, plus one familiar face. Davenport stands on a desk, straining to write something on the whiteboard at the front of the room, and Lup nudges one of the legs as they step inside. The resulting rattle elicits no obvious reaction, and he doesn’t sound at all fazed when he says, with a sigh in his voice, “Hello, Lup.”

“Hey, Dav,” she returns airily, and breezes over to where Barry’s sitting, engaged with something on his tablet. He glances up as she approaches, and then smiles when she presses a kiss to his cheek. “What’s up, four-eyes?”

He taps the screen. “Oh, this is really cool stuff. You ever wonder what would happen if you mixed formaldehyde with sodium hydroxide, and, and then tested it on a skin sample? Preservative versus corrosive. Cannizzaro reaction, right? But imagine if you tried it on a cadaver. I’ve gotta see what it does to the cell layers.”

“Babe,” says Lup, “that is creepy as shit. We have to test it out.”

Barry grins. “God, I know. Oh, but, we probably shouldn’t do research on the school computers anymore. I think they monitor our search history, ’cause the librarian was givin’ me some weird looks the other day.”

“Duly noted.” She leans in and props her arms on his shoulders, resting her chin in the crook of his neck. It’s been a long day but seeing Barry makes every long-ass period worth it, every time. “Oh, speaking of creepy shit, you know what I saved to our Netflix queue?”

“ _The Necromantics_?”

“Bingo. You, me, occult documentary night. I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“Like you even have to ask.”

“Mr. _Highchurch_ ,” Magnus groans from the other side of the room. He has a freshly obtained bruise on the bridge of his nose, which he’s telling everyone is from boxing at the gym, but what Lup happens to know is actually because he’d knocked over a rack of mannequins in a storage closet, freaked out, and ended up with a few on top of him as he’d tried to escape. She’d promised him she wouldn’t tell, and fully intends to keep that promise, short of a prime opportunity for blackmail. “Barry and Lup are being all _PDA_ on each other.”

“Fuck off,” chorus Barry and Lup, unrehearsed. God, she’s so lucky to have him.

Merle peers, uninterested, over the top of that day’s reading material. Today it’s a dusty-looking hardcover with some TV personality posing on the front, and the title proclaims: _Modern Medicine: An Industrial Faux Pas!_ “Lucretia, is PDA against the rules in debate club?”

Their president has markers in both hands, writing out something next to Davenport in her elegant scrawl. She doesn’t turn around when she says, “Don’t be gross.”

“There you go,” says Merle.

Lup sticks her tongue out at Magnus. He looks like he’s ready to return it in full, but just then Lucretia raps one of her markers against the whiteboard. “Let’s get started, people!” she says. “We’ve got a lot to do today and just over an hour to do it!”

* * *

Neverwinter has its share of small-town celebrities. Their very own Magnus Burnsides had been featured in the paper for rescuing a dog from an unfortunate dip in the river. Lup couldn’t remember the last time something _really_ big happened—apparently a train had almost collided with them sometime back, but that was before she and Taako lived here and besides, _almost_ is nothing worth talking about. The papers drone on about whose macarons won which rec center’s competition and which office party ended in a drunken street brawl that was actually just two men yelling at each other at medium volume, and it’s fun, sure, but that’s all it is. Apart from its ridiculous climate, there’s nothing much that puts Neverwinter on the map.

Enter Davenport—retired Navy captain, Merle’s husband, former speech team champion. The trophy that sits behind Merle’s desk declares him first in the nation for the exceptional delivery of a dramatic monologue, and although they’ve begged him to recite it more than once, he’s turned them down every time. “I don’t build my reputation on past glories,” he says. They’ve all decided that his knack for saying things straight out of a World War II memoir is equal parts satisfying and baffling enough. Combined with a neatly styled tangerine mustache and the hair to match (which he swears is completely natural, despite Taako’s repeated investigations into whether or not he owns hair dye), he’s easy to pick out in a crowd if you’re not already staring at his sideshow of a husband. Davenport maintains his own brand of intrigue, but they all know there’s more to him than meets the eye—he comes up with puns faster than you can recognize there’s a joke to be had, for one, and for another, he’s not-Vegas-married to Merle _fucking_ Highchurch.

“The power of _why_ ,” he says, as Lucretia shoves the desk back into place. “That’s our topic for the day, and it’s a real dangerous thing in debate. If your opponent can ask you why, and you can’t come up with a rebuttal, it doesn’t matter how small the point is. Your argument’s over. Done. Even if you do manage to recover, it’s not gonna be pretty.”

Taako raises a hand and, without waiting to be acknowledged, says, “Why?”

Davenport sighs. “Because you’ve proven you don’t have a comprehensive enough understanding of your topic to explain yourself.”

“Why?” Magnus interjects, and Lup’s twin snickers.

“Because you didn’t have the foresight to cover every angle of your argument.”

“Davenport? I have an actual question, thanks—” Lucretia rearranges her sweater over her shoulders in a huff. If dramatic pauses were a life skill (and honestly, there’s no evidence to suggest that they’re not), it would explain exactly why she’s as put-together as she is. Lup finds herself leaning forward in anticipation as their president gathers herself, folds her hands, and meets Davenport’s critical gaze. “Why?”

Merle giggles behind his book. “Because you were too distracted by a couple of teenage louts to think about it,” says Davenport, without missing a beat—and right, yeah, that’s why there are a good few more of those trophies at his and Merle’s place.

“ _Burn_ ,” Lup sings. Lucretia raises an eyebrows and sits back, looking satisfied.

Snark quota evidently sated, Davenport raps a marker on the whiteboard, where a set of prompts are scrawled in orange and blue. The ones in orange slant steeply downward, and he frowns briefly at them before he continues. “I want you guys to pair up and work on breaking these arguments,” he says. “Ask your partner _why_ and see if they can answer. I’ll even out the group, unless Merle, you want to…?”

Merle flaps a hand at them. “Go buck wild.”

Everyone erupts into squabbling over who gets Davenport and which side gets to go first, and instantly Lup’s hand shoots up. “I call Luce.”

The room breaks off their collective quarrel to groan as one. “No way,” says Magnus. “Last time you guys debated, you broke my fucking phone!”

Lup rolls her eyes. “The screen cracked, you baby. It’s on you for letting me use it as a prop.”

“Props aren’t something you _break_!”

“Depends on the prop,” Taako muses.

“There are no props in debate,” says Davenport, sounding hopelessly confused.

Lucretia raises a finger. “We were just trying to—”

“No, no. I don’t want to know.”

The compromise they settle on pairs Lup with Magnus and Lucretia with Barry, which is a little like pairing fire with ice, but Lup doesn’t doubt Barry can hold his own against their formidable president. She focuses on poking holes in Magnus’s argument for raising the minimum wage, and even though his frustration starts to filter through his voice after two rounds of _why_ , he shoots back at her with only slightly clumsy comebacks. Nearby, Taako’s perched on a desk, swinging his feet and arguing back and forth with Davenport. Listening to them debate is like listening to machine gun shells hitting the ground—if anyone can make a grown man cry, it’s Taako (as evidenced by the video of an over-exasperated Leon sitting on Lup’s phone), but if anyone can stand up to Taako’s flippant retorts, it’s Davenport. They’re rapid-fire and relentless, and when Lup glances over at Merle, she catches him watching his husband with an inkling of pride in his eyes.

Gag her with a spoon, but there’s something honest-to-God endearing about that.

After Lup has her turn against Magnus, who takes his revenge in peak annoying-little-brother form by questioning every angle of her argument, she sits back and listens to Lucretia and Barry finish up. “That’s just fallacious,” she’s saying, and, well, it’s no surprise that those two are fully and completely off script. “You can't argue that civil rights are equitable to a financial burden on the states.”

Barry shakes his head. “Following in the footsteps of the civil rights movement doesn’t equal being a part of it, y’know? You’re taking this whole thing and making it into a social issue, and that’s how you dodge what really matters—like—like how the states are gonna fight for actual civil rights problems when they don’t have the funds to do it.”

Lup’s boyfriend isn’t a debater. He can research like nobody’s business, and more than a few times she’s caught him reading Wikipedia articles on their down time; he’s a treasure trove of random trivia about everything from celebrity scandals to the history of attempted resurrection. But he insists on leaving the debate to them. “My palms get all sweaty,” he tells Lup, whenever she mentions offhandedly that he could participate in the next competition. “And my glasses fog up, and like—nah, nah, it’s not my thing. You guys have fun, though.”

Still, standing your ground against Lucretia and her icy rebuttals is no mere mortal’s feat. The timer at the front of the room goes off, and Lup grins across the room at Barry, who just shrugs. _My boyfriend’s a badass_ , she mouths at him. He looks like he gets the idea and gives her a sheepish thumbs up.

They do a couple more rotations, and she ends up with Taako, which is kind of like arguing in front of a mirror if the mirror interspersed its argument with snide comments about where the founder of debate could shove their logic and reasoning. It ends in a draw, of course—sooner or later one of them would have to win, but she has the feeling it would involve another broken phone, among other things, and that shit's much better suited to Saturdays. The timer buzzes, and just as it does Taako’s phone lights up, and he snatches it off the desk faster than Lup can glance at the notification.

“Whoa, there,” she says. “Expecting something from someone?”

He snorts, but his eyes flicker to the ceiling and away from her. “Please. Just because I don’t want you all up in my shit doesn’t mean I’m hidin’ something, okay?”

“I never said anything about hiding—”

“It’s nothing,” Taako snaps, with more vitriol than she’s used to. “It’s nothing, Lup, okay?”

 _O_ -kay. She hasn’t heard him this defensive since spring break of last year, and that had ended with an inordinate amount of alcohol and an even more inordinate amount of Mariah Carey. Lup holds her hands up in surrender, even though he’s already looked back down at the phone, lips twisted into an unreadable knot. She sighs and steps back as Lucretia claps her hands. “Let’s rotate!” she says. “One more go and then we’re all free to enjoy the weekend. Responsibly.”

Lup turns slowly on her heel and almost smacks face-to-chest-first into Barry, who grins. “Hey,” he says. “You ready to get your ass kicked with words?”

“Oh, you’re on, loverboy.”

She accentuates it with a dramatic flip of her hair, propping her hands on her hips as Barry launches into his opening bit. He’s cut down on the stammering, she notices, and holds her stare for longer, even though he occasionally has to break away and look around the room. He’s come a long way from the freshman who couldn’t look her in the eye—

* * *

_“So,” she says, and her scrutinizing smirk turns him red as a cherry tomato.“What’s your deal, babe? Why’re you hanging around here if you’re not into the whole… speaking thing?”_

_He forages for a response in the penciled-in grooves of the desk below, digging his nail into the tiny valleys of each carving. It’s so, so painfully obvious that he’s intimidated by her—at this point she’s practically expecting it. “I, uh. I’m interested, I guess. And I wanted to give some new stuff a try, y’know? Never done debate before, never hung out with debate kids before… high school’s about new experiences ’n shit, I figured now was the time.”_

_This is verging on straight-up entertainment. She gets the feeling she’s going to enjoy hanging around him._

* * *

He may not have the chops for onstage argument, but Barry talks about everything with conviction, like he knows it as an absolute truth and you’d be stupid as hell to convince him otherwise. She watches him with an affectionate grin playing across her face, and glances only once back at Taako, who’s still idling on his phone—and then she squints. Blinks. Wonders if the light’s playing tricks on her.

Taako, her emotionally stunted, empathetically challenged other half, is looking down at his phone with a stupidly soft smile.


	5. the status quo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lup makes a change. Taako deflects. The NSDT enjoys a well-earned break.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey there! it's been awhile, hasn't it? just as i started writing this chapter, i was struck down with an unexpectedly nasty case of the stomach flu that put me out of commission for a full week. that's the best explanation i have for as to why this chapter is so, SO late. i'm working hard to get caught up, but in the meantime, i hope you'll indulge me in this somewhat somber interlude! everything's fine, i promise. probably. most likely.
> 
> hope everybody's having a fun, successful end to their year! and if you're not, just remember 2018 is almost here—we've almost made it, people!

_“For me,”_ says the preppy-looking young woman, draped in school colors and oozing enthusiasm, _“college was a game-changer, y’know? For the first time, I feel like I could get an education and have a social life at the same time! There were so many opportunities out there for me to explore, and I knew that wherever I went, I’d meet people like me, who would accept me for who I—”_

Lup closes the laptop.

Immediately the video cuts out, and she tugs her earbuds from her ears and flings them onto the desk. Sunlight spills through the window and warms her through her bright red NSDT sweatshirt where she sits, feet propped on the sill, next to a tabletop covered in worksheets. To her teachers’ credit, Lup’s never seen a more impressive lineup of busywork. She’s polished off the assignment from her only remotely interesting class (physics, and even then, significant figures leave her feeling even drowsier than the heat), and just sparing a glance in the direction of the rest is giving her a headache. They’re all junior year reviews and aptitude assessments and carefully drawn-up time wasters, engineered to waste the maximum potential of a Saturday afternoon. In short, they’re beneath her. And she’ll do them in time—she always does—but right now the very thought of them makes irritation simmer like asphalt under Lup’s skin.

She’s restless, which is a feeling even worse than boredom, because it’s boredom amplified and driven up into a flurry of useless, roiling motivation. All that kinetic energy and nowhere to put it. Lup snatches a stress ball off her desk and bounces it at the window. It rebounds and she catches it, turns it around in her hands, then tosses it again.

_Thud. Thud._

There’s only one thing to do for a high school student who can’t focus on high school, which is to focus on that great looming horizon; the big university in the sky, what have you. Neverwinter’s website cheerily lists resources for college applicants, including an abundance of videos by local alumni and checklists for the meandering soul. Lup does not _meander_. She and Taako haven’t talked about it much, but they know exactly what their plan is: apply for a school with that glittering Ivy League name, get accepted, get kickass internships, blow the collective mind of the scientific world. They’re too smart for the plan _not_ to be foolproof. Any university would be lucky to have them, of course, and the sheer amount of money they’ve been offered this early in the game proves that.

Taako loves to go on about how he can’t wait to get out of Neverwinter, with its flat buildings and flat people and office complexes where startup companies go to die. Until last year, Lup had joined him in fantasizing about what they’re going to do when they _finally_ leave and go find glory where it’s waiting for them.

But now, when he lounges across her bed and starts prattling about how the town’s restaurants are utterly pathetic in variety, and he expects to be impressed with the urban scene, she can’t bring herself to contribute. She can’t bring herself to do much of anything at all, really, except sit and try to look engaged.

 _Thud_.

The thing about having a twin is that they’re a package deal. Lup won’t enroll in a school that doesn’t accept Taako, and vice versa. They’d known from the start that wherever they went after high school, they’d go together, and that sentiment hasn’t changed. Nothing’s changed.

Except—

 _Thud_.

The sink is running in the room adjacent. Taako’s getting ready. She can picture him several steps deep in his routine, skillfully blending a contour into the arch of his cheekbones and picking out a glitter-coated eyeshadow. He’d only mentioned it to her the night before, with all of his characteristic nonchalance, waving it off as easily as an overdue assignment.

“Got a date tomorrow,” he’d said, twirling spaghetti onto his fork. Friday nights were for ordering in and recovering from the NSDT’s manic energies, particularly when the mocks ran overtime—which they always tended to do, no use in pretending otherwise. That night their meal was from one of the few Italian places Taako deemed acceptable, delivered by one of the only employees he hadn’t driven to tears just yet. Their address was known and feared by every takeout place in the vicinity.

Lup looked up from her gnocchi. “Really?”

“Oh, fuck you,” he’d mumbled, through a mouthful of pasta. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Dude, nothing, just—” She’d had to dodge a noodle flicked in her direction with impressive dexterity. “I can’t remember the last time you went on a second date.”

And just like that, Taako inverted. If there was ever a master of the subtle flight response, he’d gotten it down pat somewhere in their childhood, between relatives’ false sympathies and custody arguments behind closed doors. Now it took a trained eye to pick out the signs, but they were there all the same. The set of his jaw. The slight crease to his brow. She knew that effortlessly smooth expression and, more importantly, that it wasn’t effortless at all.

“What makes you think it’s a second date?” was all he’d said.

Before Lup had a chance to respond—or react, for fuck’s sake, because her brother had just had a _visceral_ response to a perfectly innocent quip—the garage door sounded, and as one they’d picked up their plates and went silently to Lup’s bedroom. As soon as she’d closed the door and turned around, he’d settled on her bed with remote in hand, flipping through channels like nothing had happened. “ _Say Yes to the Dress_ is on,” he told her over his shoulder. “ ’S a rerun, but you should see how ugly these fuckin’ things were.”

That was how she knew she wouldn’t be getting anything else out of him that night.

The incident plays and replays in Lup’s head as she tosses her ball at the window again. _Thud_. _Thud_. She’s ninety-nine percent sure there’s nothing really, truly wrong with Taako. For one, he's not drinking. Not out of the liquor cabinet under the stairs; not Ren’s piña coladas, which is when she knows it’s _very_ bad. But something—or someone—is shaking up his love life. And she’s going to figure it out if it’s the last thing she does.

Or she’s obsessing over Taako being his usual strange self, because she needs to think about literally anything other than _fucking college_.

 _THUD_.

Lup’s phone vibrates.

The ball bounces backward and off her forehead.

It drops into her lap and she curses, snatches it up, and launches it at her closet. It disappears into a pile of jackets and discarded shoes. Her hair is ruffled where the blow had landed, and a few staticky strands float around her field of view with frustrating persistence. Suddenly the heat isn’t relaxing anymore. It’s stifling and sticky and too heavy for her to sit around in, and when she tries to breathe, it’s like sucking in a lungful of liquid.

A text sits on her phone and chimes cheerily at her.

 _my nerd ♡♡♡ - 3:46 PM  
_ _Hey :) how’s your day going?_

Alright. That’s _it_.

 _lup - 3:46 PM  
_ _u cool if i pick u up? we’re gonna go do smth impulsive_

* * *

She only remembers to text Taako and let him know she’s going out when she’s in the car, halfway down the driveway, sneakers untied and sweatshirt looped haphazardly around her waist. By the time she does, Barry’s already responded—she doesn’t know what she’d do without him and his complete lack of a social life. _Sure thing babe_ , is his blasé reply. _If it’s science related just lmk & I’ll bring my chemistry set. _

Lup shoots off a quick _god bless ur dorky ass heart, but no chem set required_ and floors it down the street, undoubtedly shattering the speed limit and pissing off a good few stay-at-home moms. The drive to Barry’s house is simple and boring, even; she never even turns out of the neighborhood. Instead, she whips past rows of identical townhouses, each more mundane-looking than the next, and the odd immaculately kept garden. They all pale in comparison to Merle’s, of course, which has won awards from the Neverwinter Garden Society for sheer size and span alone. The NSDT has held entire victory meetups in Davenport and Merle’s expansive backyard. It’s lush and overgrown and one of the few locations in town that looks completely untamed, free from any neighborhood regulation. That’s one thing she and Merle have always had in common. First, do no harm; but second, always stick it to the man.

She’s doing it again. Dwelling. Reminiscing. The past is clinging to her like a layer of sweat.

What is her _problem?_

She doesn’t realize she’s sitting in Barry’s driveway until there’s a knock at the passenger side window. Lup jumps and bangs her knees on the steering wheel, then reaches over to unlock the door with a muttered apology. And there’s Barry. Seeing his face doesn’t quite relieve the tension laced in her shoulders, but it does wonders for the knot of depressive agitation sitting in her gut. He’s standing there in his NSDT sweatshirt, which is further proof that they’re on the same wavelength, looking a little dazed and charmingly disheveled for a Saturday afternoon. She recognizes his casual jeans, the ones with the tailored rips along the thighs, and a pair of scuffed-up sneakers that he’d worn to their Seattle field trip sophomore year. They’re still muddied from traipsing through wet sand and mud along the coast, holding his raincoat over his head, glasses fogged over and dripping with condensation—

* * *

_“C’mon!” she yells. The umbrella’s handle is slick in her fingers, fanned out in front of her like a shield. “Keep up, Barry!”_

_Thunder echoes loudly overhead as she forges on. He’s struggling behind her, tromping through the dunes and kicking sand up onto her ankles, and when she glances back she can see his lenses are almost entirely misted over. Between that and keeping the poncho yanked over his head, it’s little wonder he hasn’t tripped over his own feet._

_She sighs and stops short, and he nearly stumbles into her. “Hold this!” she yells, and shoves the umbrella at him._

_“I—” He starts to protest, but she doesn’t give him time. As he awkwardly levels the umbrella over their heads, she pulls his glasses off and splutters as she’s whipped by a surge of rain. It takes her a full ten seconds of blinking condensation out of her contacts, but when she regains her bearings, she wraps the hem of her shirt around the spectacles and rubs furiously. He watches her, struck dumb, half-blinded by the storm._

_It takes another good few seconds, but she sets them back on his face and snatches the umbrella back. “You’re a disaster!” she says._

_She knows that expression of his, and she knows it means he’s at a complete loss for a reply. “I—I know,” is all he can muster, and they’re standing on a wave-lashed beach with a storm raging around them, but he’s looking at her like there’s no greater source of shock and awe; like she’s larger than the ocean itself._

* * *

“—okay?”

Lup blinks.

Barry’s in the passenger seat, one hand over hers, slightly chilled from the autumn air. His eyes bore into hers with obvious concern, and _fuck_ , she hates it when he looks at her like that, because it means she’s made him worry. “Lup?”

“Uh, yeah,” she says. “I’m good. I’m cool. You ready to do something crazy?”

* * *

Five minutes later, they pull into the parking lot of a strip mall, which Lup doesn’t think is anticlimactic in the least, because plenty of batshit things have happened in strip mall parking lots and certainly will continue to happen, so long as they keep radiating those inexplicable chaotic energies. Of course, her focus isn’t the parking lot. Her focus is the storefront that looms above them, spattered with paper cutouts of autumn leaves and tacky closeups of even tackier-looking models. It’s the picturesque location for all sorts of possibility, and as she hops out of the car, she feels the flickering impulse in her stomach ignite into a full-out flame. She’s made the right decision. She’s made an _excellent_ decision. This is where it all happens.

“A, uh… a hair salon,” says Barry.

She grins maniacally at him. “You know it.”

The bell over the door gives a strangled chime as she pushes it open, letting it bounce off the wall and swing shut behind them. The man at the front desk has a meticulously groomed beard and a shock of dark red hair, which stays gel-stiff and intact as he looks up from his phone. “Uh, hi. Can I he—”

“Hi,” says Lup brightly, and snaps off her elastic with a flourish. She knows Barry and the two other customers are staring, but right now she can safely say she doesn’t give a damn. “I’d like to cut this off.”

The man takes her in with eyes as wide as plates, then motions to a sweet-faced woman nearby. She gives Lup a once-over, hums, and gestures to an empty chair with a polite smile. To her credit, she doesn’t look as intimidated by Lup’s mass of hair as the man had. “Okay, um… what were you thinking?”

“Pixie undercut,” says Lup, lacing her fingers through Barry’s and tugging him over. “You don’t mind spectating, babe, do you?”

“Uh, no, but—”

“Awesome.” She flops into the chair in front of a light-studded mirror and shoots a full, charismatic grin at the hairdresser. “Let’s do this, hon.”

It’s an ordeal to get her hair clean, as it always is. The hairdresser, who introduces herself as Teresa, leads Lup to the back and lets it soak, then scrubs it through with a half bottle of shampoo and conditioner and wrings it out over the wash basin. Barry waits nearby, watching with an unreadable look on his face. She doesn’t think much of it—sure, she’s being spontaneous, but that’s precisely what he’s signed up for. Besides, they’ve gotten up to stranger things on Saturday afternoons. If he’s this daunted by the prospect of a haircut, senior year has seriously lowered his standards. They wouldn’t be the first thing it’s barreled through, ripped apart, and carelessly revised like it’s nothing, like just because it’s the last year things have to be different, like—

Well. Anyway.

By the time they get back to the chair, the sky’s started to dim, and Barry takes a seat next to them as Teresa starts to cut through Lup’s hair. To call it a process would be putting it lightly. She and Taako have always had rope-thick locks, but he insists on attacking it with all manner of product on the market, including strategically thinning it and bleaching it with the strongest dyes he can find. Lup’s ready to begrudgingly admit that he might have been onto something. Her hair does not go easy, and just hacking it down to shoulder length is an adventure in itself. At one point a kid comes by with a large broom, looks somewhat like he’s about to cry, and does his best to push away heaps of hair from Teresa’s feet. She actually does feel a little bad about that, but, well, what’s she supposed to do about genetics?

The afternoon fades into a quiet evening, and fluorescent lights soak the pavement outside in a bright, surgical glow. Teresa steps away for the third or fourth time to get another new pair of scissors, and when she does, Lup notices Barry, staring absently out the enormous windows. She reaches over with a huff of effort and pokes his shoulder.

“Huh—oh, hey.” He smiles. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “How’s it goin’?”

“Oh, y’know. I’m having freshman year flashbacks.” Her hair falls in waves around her chin, curling just enough to tickle her jawline. Without the extra few pounds hanging from her skull, Lup feels considerably lighter, but she also looks surprisingly younger. Softer. Before she’d gotten over her gratuitous use of hair dye and the compulsive need to look like somebody’s manic pixie love interest. “You doing okay? Hungry?”

Barry’s eyes glaze over in thought. “Oh. I haven’t had dinner, have I?”

“Way to flake,” she teases, and he rolls his eyes at her, but she catches it again—that telltale glint of worry. Something’s up, and he’s not telling her, and that’s even worse than—

Than the fact that she _literally_ has a weight off her shoulders, and she still feels—

“Hey,” says Lup. “Are you okay?”

His gaze flicks back to her. “Yeah, I’m fine. Are _you_ okay?”

“Deflecting, are we?” she quips, and makes a point of ignoring the twinge in her chest, because god _dammit_ , there’s nothing she hates more than making him fuss over her. It’s all well and good when he’s being a doting boyfriend, and hell if she doesn’t deserve that, but this is different. It’s fragile and volatile and she doesn’t like it at all. “Why d’you ask?”

“Because this is just—” He gestures helplessly to her, and the piles of hair on the floor, and the reference photo Teresa has taped to the mirror. “I dunno, outta nowhere. I know you like that sorta thing, Lup, I just… wanna make sure this is just because, and not because of anything else. And, well, shit. That… that doesn’t make sense.”

Actually it makes perfect sense. “I’ve been thinking,” says Lup.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She reaches up to tangle her fingers in a strand of hair, but they fall against her shoulder when she remembers. It is, for lack of a better idea, like missing a phantom limb. Her hair’s grown wild and unbridled for the last two years, and she’s hardly one for sentiment, but having it this short still feels a little too strange for her liking. Lup can’t imagine what it’s going to be like when it’s all over. And—well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? “I told Luce I was going to do policy debate, but I was thinking I might do some, uh… some dramatic extemp. Haven’t done it in awhile, figured… why the hell not, right?”

Barry can’t keep the confusion from passing over his face, and she doesn’t blame him. But he’s her boyfriend, and he’s used to her unconventional ways, which means he’s back on his feet in a second. “I think that’d be nice,” he says.

“Wouldn’t it?” Lup meets her own stare in the mirror. The lights reflect back into her eyes and make them look otherworldly and ethereal, and for a minute, she doesn’t quite recognize herself. It’s the hair, of course. Taako’s practically cultivated a brand around his eccentricities and his loyal following, but Lup’s reputation isn’t quite the same deal. She’s known and feared for the raw power in her looks alone. And that’s assuming the public isn’t familiar with her debate skills, because that tends to make her even harder to forget.

That’s her: Unforgettable. Indomitable. She makes her own decisions, and however spontaneous they seem, you had better believe they’re all for a reason, all part of the long game—her four-year plan and its perfect, polished, collegiate conclusion.

“Talk about a flashback,” she says, and smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what did i say? everything's fine.
> 
> probably.


	6. shame the devil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lup debuts her new ’do. Magnus advocates for the canine electorate. The NSDT goes back to basics.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaaand we're back! it's been a crazy few weeks, but i'm super relieved to return to my good good nsdt fam and all of you. as always, thank you guys so much for your constant and wonderful support. this fic recently got to 1k hits, and it absolutely blew my mind—that's a lot of people, my dudes! all reading my stuff? what?? it's crazy, and amazing, and i'm so, so thankful.
> 
> here's something else crazy: the dynamic, utterly brilliant adeline (@foxy-alien on tumblr) did some seriously stunning art for end of an era! [this gorgeous piece](https://gayipre.tumblr.com/post/169174937438/foxy-alien-this-is-for-my-fantastic-friendo) is from chapter two, here we have [a very dapper-looking luce from the chapter three flashback,](https://gayipre.tumblr.com/post/169677770638/foxy-alien-hi-i-fucking-live-for-gayipre-debate) and more recently, [this fucking hilarious comic](https://gayipre.tumblr.com/post/169943417823/foxy-alien-happy-birthday-to-my-beautiful-girl) based off another scene in chapter three! needless to say, i cherish each and every one of them, and i encourage you to go check them out and also give adeline's art a look, because it does not disappoint!
> 
> lastly, a fun tidbit: the title of this chapter, "shame the devil", is taken from the idiom "tell the truth and shame the devil." foreshadowing, or just a kickass turn of phrase? you decide!
> 
> hope everyone's weathering the winter well. ♡

“And _that_ ,” says Magnus, as Lup tosses her bag into an empty chair, “is why dogs should vote.”

Taako’s wearing his _I’m-only-half-listening_ face, but he looks mildly impressed when Magnus sits back with a flourish. “That’s—that’s a pretty solid argument, my man. Polish it up and you could have yourself a pretty nifty comedy piece right there.”

“Wait, what? You just said it was a solid argument! I was being serious, Taako, I really think dogs should be able to vote! Listen. If we really want to work towards—uh, a better world, we have to look to a more inclusive electorate, right? So _dogs_ are the logical and positive solution to our problem of, uh, trying to repair the people’s fractured trust in the government—”

“Damn,” says Lup, snagging a nearby seat. “Tell me where I can get in on this debate.” She swings her legs up onto the desk and lets them fall with a _thud_ , startling just about everyone in the room, including Merle from behind a new magazine. He looks up in no particular hurry, evidently intent on finishing his paragraph of _Beach Living_ ’s 100th annual issue, and catches sight of Lup where she lounges next to Magnus.

“You, uh…” Merle shakes the magazine in her direction. “You changed your jacket!”

“No,” says Magnus; “no, that’s wrong—”

“Hair! You changed your hair.” He drops _Beach Living_ and claps his hands. “It’s all gone! Ain’t that somethin’!”

Taako fixes her with a glare that could superheat liquid nitrogen. “Yeah. Ain’t that something, _traitor_?”

As it turns out, Lup’s actions have consequences.

More specifically, she’d sent a post-haircut selfie to Taako, who’d responded with an inordinate amount of keysmashing and several demands for her explanation as to why he’d made a major life decision without her, why twin solidarity seemed to mean nothing to her anymore, if she even cared that she was dead to him, et cetera. This was followed by an hour of radio silence, which he promptly broke when he texted her that she could order herself dinner, thank you very much, and that the date was going _stellar_ , in case she was interested. Lup has to give her brother credit where credit is due—very few are blessed with the talent to make a text so remarkably petty. She’d even showed off his flurry of messages to Carey and Killian, who’d been suitably impressed.

Merle is, as he tends to be, the last of the NSDT to find out about this recent development. Lup’s enjoyed the reactions, to say the least. (Excluding Magnus, who’d nearly crushed her hand in with a hammer in his excitement and promptly been scolded by their shop teacher. But if there’s one thing she’s used to, it’s shaking up her friends’ respective worlds, and if that lands her with a crushed hand then she supposes that’s just the price of having an impact.)

Taako’s only pretending to hold a grudge now, she knows. He shoots her an over-exaggerated glare from his seat and crosses his arms. “Anyway, Merle, don’t encourage her. Next thing you know, I’m gonna get home and she’ll have—have turned my bedroom into a, I dunno, a billiard room.”

“Okay, that actually sounds pretty fuckin’ sweet,” says Magnus.

“Or a personal library,” Lucretia interjects from the whiteboard. She’s in the middle of sketching out a flowchart titled _THE NATURAL PROGRESSION OF LOGIC_ , which already has ten different bubbles bursting with bullet points. Today’s lesson, Lup suspects. She adores Lucretia—she really, truly does, but she has to stifle a yawn behind her hand as Magnus and Taako start debating the pros and cons of an in-house pool table.

Diagrams. She is _really_ not feeling the diagrams today.

* * *

_“Hey, Madam President!” Lup leans back against the wall with the most charming smile she can muster. It’s not her best, granted, but she isn’t expecting much of herself given that a) it’s the end of a long day, and b) she’s attending the second ever meeting of a club she has no real obligation to. “Got a minute?”_

_Lucretia pauses in her manic scribing of the largest, most complex-looking Venn diagram Lup’s ever seen. It already sports several arrows that stick out of it like thick, brightly colored spikes, and both circles are crowded with countless lines of freakishly neat handwriting. She’s discovered she can’t look directly at it without risking eye strain. “Oh. Lup, right?”_

_“You know it. Uh, I was just wondering… is this thing, is this what you’re going with?” Lup gestures broadly to the diagram. It takes a good amount of her wingspan, and she wonders briefly how in God’s name Lucretia’s circles are so perfect._

_Their president frowns. “What do you mean?”_

_“Nothing, really! Just—” She raps her knuckles against the board. “You really expect everybody to focus up when you’ve got this monster hanging around?”_

_Lucretia glances up at the tops of her circles, which are abnormally round for something sketched by an overtired high schooler. “I mean… I guess it’s a pretty good diagram, but I don’t think it’s going to be too distracting, do you?”_

_“No, that’s not what I…” Lup sucks in a breath and keeps her smile. “Lucretia, hon, nobody can read that thing.”_

_“It’s an eyesore!” Taako adds from across the room, and she shoots him a capital-L Look, because she’s trying to break it to Lucretia gentle. Of course, her twin’s just flung gentleness headlong out the open window, and now Lucretia is looking at Lup like she’s just stepped on her toes. So much for the roundabout approach._

_“Yeah,” says Lup. “It’s an eyesore.”_

_Lucretia shoots a dubious look at her Venn diagram, then surveys the room. Merle is thoroughly engaged on whatever story is on the front page of his newspaper; Magnus and Taako are on their respective phones—the latter, she thinks, probably texting a guy she’ll disapprove of. Barry, like he’d never left, is sitting in the exact same desk and scrawling on a near-identical worksheet. He glances up when Lucretia’s gaze falls on him, and Lup files that away for teasing potential at a later date._

_She glances back at Lup and sighs. “They’re not going to process it at all, are they?”_

_“ ’Fraid not, babe.”_

_Lucretia actually looks a bit dejected, and to her surprise, Lup can’t help but feel sorry for her. She’s a tryhard, but an endearing tryhard, which is rare on its own but practically unheard of among freshmen. “Thanks,” she says, a little drily. “I, uh… appreciate the heads-up.”_

_“Hey,” says Lup, and silently curses her charity. “Listen. It’s not you, okay? Diagrams are boring across the board.” She grins at her own joke—at least she’s still got it without having to try. “You got, uh… any videos you could show? Something flashy? A real attention-getter, y’know?”_

_“I…” Lucretia considers. “I have some national competition recordings. A couple presidential debates. I could show those as an introduction to the format, I suppose.”_

_Lup lightly, amiably punches her arm. “There you go! Significantly less boring. Everybody loves videos, and if you get those queued up, I’ll make sure these jokers don’t nod off, mkay? Consider me your inside woman.”_

_She really, truly has no idea why she’s doing this, but the light that breaks across Lucretia’s face makes her suspect her efforts will be worth it. “Well. Thank you, Lup. That’s really nice of you.”_

_“No problemo,” says Lup, and winks. “Just consider it an informal IOU. Payback preferred, but… not required.”_

* * *

Taako’s phone buzzes and startles her back into the present. He breaks off mid-argument with Magnus and plucks it out of his pocket, then settles back into his chair and starts tapping out a reply. Lup watches, just short of mesmerized. He never responds that quickly—not even to her. She’s known him to leave teachers, employers, and boyfriends on read for hours at a time. And yet there he’s sitting, texting back like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

She’s not the only one who notices. Magnus leans over, craning his neck to see over the top of Taako’s bedazzled phone case. “Whozzat?”

Without missing a beat, Taako snatches up a pen from the desk and pokes Magnus in the forehead. Magnus sits back, reeling, looking like a dog on the wrong end of a rolled-up newspaper. “Top-secret convo with the mayor of Neverwinter. Seriously, my dude? Where’s my constitutional right to privacy?”

“Right to privacy,” says Lucretia over her shoulder. “ _Excellent_ debate topic.”

“Yeah, that—that’s a juicy little tidbit of controversy, Mango, occupy yourself.” He returns to his phone, and Lup can’t help but feel a spark of admiration. No one can deflect as skillfully as her brother.

Of course, that spark is promptly replaced with a burning, raging flame of intrigue, because _Taako is deflecting_. Whatever’s going on isn’t just _up_ , it’s somewhere in the fucking stratosphere.

A pair of arms encircle her shoulders, and Lup nearly jumps out of her seat. “Whoa—hey!” comes Barry’s voice from behind her. “Sorry, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you!”

Lup thanks every star in the sky that Taako isn’t paying attention, because he’d never let her live that down. She’s skittish today. She’s _never_ skittish. “Holy shit, babe,” she says, and reaches up to ruffle Barry’s hair. “You should know better than to interrupt me when I’m mid-brilliant-thought-sesh.”

“Oh, geez, please forgive me.” He presses a kiss to her temple and pulls up a seat next to her. Magnus doesn’t offer a greeting—possibly because he’s taken Taako’s suggestion to heart—and her twin is still absorbed in his phone, maintaining a flawless deadpan. Lup narrows her eyes at him before she turns back to her boyfriend, who sets his backpack down with a sigh. “So,” he says. “How many people did you almost kill with your new look today?”

She hums. “Not sure. Probably in the double digits, if I had to guess.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less from you.” He takes her hand under the desk, and Lup catches his eye. Barry isn’t exactly one for unwarranted affection—that’s more her thing, which means one of two things: he has something to tell her (unlikely) or he’s not acting like himself (unheard of). She keeps his gaze as he leans in, just subtly enough to suggest the kind of affection that repels their fellow members. “Just, uh, just checking in. You doing okay?”

Lup stares blankly at him.

She almost says, _That’s my line_ , because she knows he has his hair-trigger days. He’s explained to her that sometimes it’s hard to breathe, and he doesn’t exactly know why, but he needs someone to coach him through until he remembers how to do it himself. It’s the abundance of people, he says; the overwhelming pressure of existence, or final exams, which he tell her are about the same. Anxiety stalks Barry like a second shadow. He’s not the only one of her friends to deal with it, of course, but she knows it in him better than she knows it in anyone else.

And yet here he is, asking if she’s okay.

“I’m…” She shoots him a quizzical look. “I’m fine? What d’you mean?”

Before Barry can respond, Lucretia claps her hands. She’s polished off the whiteboard diagram, which if anything looks twice as menacing and now includes a color code, and now she looks expectantly to the rest of the NSDT. Lup skims the room with a cursory glance and realizes that like her, they’re all trying extremely hard not to look intimidated. “Okay,” says their president. “Here’s the deal. We’ve got two weeks ‘til the first competition—”

“ _Whoo_!” Magnus interrupts.

He’s lucky to be on the receiving end of one of Lucretia’s rare, good-natured eye rolls, which at the very least doesn’t mean to go for the jugular. “ _So_ I thought we’d talk basic argument theory. A little refresher, if you will. We’ll start with an idea. Any idea…”

She launches into her presentation, and Lup squeezes Barry’s hand. “ _I’m fine_ ,” she mouths. “ _Promise_.”

He nods with that familiar, uncertain set to his jaw. He doesn’t believe her, but she’ll give him time to let that fact marinate, as Lucretia puts it, because it’s the God-honest truth and she doesn’t know what else she can do with that. She squeezes his hand again and catches Taako out of the corner of her eye, still texting, not even pretending to pay a quarter of his attention. For once, Lup’s not trying to be obnoxious when she elbows him. “Hey,” she whispers. “Focus up, will you?”

Taako’s eyes snap to hers with an uncharacteristic sharpness, and she almost leans back, because he looks like he’s trying to pin her to a bulletin board. “I can multitask,” is all he says, and goes back to his phone. He’s crooked his palm in such a way that even when she sits up, she can’t make out a thing on his screen.

Lup glances back at Lucretia, who’s carrying on in earnest. She’s had it with detective work—which is a generous term, sure, but she’s sick of not knowing. Whoever invented the concept of not knowing can take it and shove it. Her brother is acting straight-up bizarre _and_ secretive, on top of it all, and they don’t keep secrets from each other. That means this is big. Bigger than big. Bigger than Lucretia’s absolute behemoth of a diagram and the undoubtedly five-foot-tall stacks of index cards she has in her bag. It’s too important for Lup not to know.

Fuck subtlety. She’s doing this her way.

* * *

“So,” says Lup, as she tosses her backpack into the backseat. Taako is already sitting cross-legged up front, hands laced behind his head, looking out at the parking lot through a pair of tinted glasses. He likes those, she knows, because other people can’t tell how he’s reacting. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, he prefers his with the curtains drawn.

And that’s exactly why she needs the direct approach. She needs to kick down the door, stalk across the room, and throw those curtains wide open. She needs to let the sunlight stream through and really wake up the room’s dusty, shadowed decor. She needs to take in every corner and detail because as soon as she drops her guard, the curtains are going to fall shut again.

Lup’s metaphors are getting annoyingly complicated.

“So,” Taako replies. He doesn’t turn his head as she slides into the driver’s seat, throws the shift into reverse and spins the steering wheel. “You got something to say, or—”

“Are you dating someone?”

She has a feeling that if he were driving, which is a laughable thing on its own, he would have slammed the brakes. Instead, Taako stifles a yawn behind his hand. “I’m always dating, Lulu. Can’t deny the open market all _this_.”

“No,” says Lup. “Like, actually dating someone. Like—” She sighs. “Like _spring break of last year_ dating.”

“Okay— _why_ would you bring that up, exactly?”

“Because you’ve been acting fucking weird, Taako! And today, like—” The light in front of them turns green, and Lup pushes on the accelerator. “Like, I don’t want to be _that person_ , but Luce worked hard on that presentation, okay?”

Taako snorts. “I wasn’t paying attention to a boring fuckin’ diagram, and you—your immediate conclusion is ‘Oh, gee, he must be dating somebody’? Are you for real?”

“Dude.” Their car comes to a screeching halt at an intersection, and Lup shifts in her seat to stare Taako down. It’s a little like trying to touch one magnet to another magnet, but she’s not about to back down. “You don’t have to tell me, okay? Just—just don’t lie to my face. I know we keep some stuff private, and that’s fine, but at least tell me if you don’t want to share something. This whole trying-to-bullshit-me thing isn’t working, and it’s just… not cool.”

Silence. God damn it, she thinks. There are so many better ways she could have gone about this—not straight up accusing her brother of lying, for one. He’s going to shut down, and she won’t be able to get anything out of him for the rest of the afternoon, and that’ll be her fault. Lup _really_ doesn’t like it when things are her fault, and she especially doesn’t like it when the things that are her fault end up hurting someone she loves. It sucks, all-around.

But then, Taako says, “You remember—uh, Kravitz?”

Lup blinks. “Your ex?”

“Yeah,” he drawls, and not for the first time, Lup realizes how serious this is, because she’s never heard Taako trying harder to sound casual. The traffic light is idling resolutely on red, and her brother fixes it with a Lucretia-level glare, like he’s fully ready to blame it for all his problems and then some. “My ex.”

She has a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of Taako’s exes, and it’s no one’s fault, not really. He dates around, and like a good sibling, she’s way over-involved in his love life. Besides, who’s going to scare off the unworthy ones? Taako is plenty formidable on his own, granted, but Lup takes it upon herself as older sister (with six minutes’ seniority, mind you) to vet her brother’s indulgences. It’s actually paid off from time to time. There are, at this current moment, at least three seniors roaming the halls of Neverwinter High who duck out of her line of sight every time she’s in the vicinity.

So, yes, she remembers Kravitz. One of last summer’s flames. He’d lasted about a month and a half, which Lup will admit is longer than most of them do, and that does count for something. But Taako can’t be saying he’s gone back to an ex. That had _nearly_ happened once, and it ended on a disastrous and thoroughly overblown note.

And yet—

And yet he’d looked so happy, texting whoever is on the other end of his phone. No worries. No regrets. She can’t help but feel a spark of envy, because she’s really not feeling the whole _regret_ thing, but it’s been clinging to her heels more and more as of late.

“So he’s the one you’ve been…”

“Dating,” says Taako, at the same time Lup says, “Texting.” This time he actually does look at her. She has no idea what’s going on behind those reflective lenses, but she imagines it’s a little bit like the exclamation points and question marks ricocheting around her brain.

“Yeah,” he continues. “We just… got back in touch. Started talking again. It was nice, so we met up a couple times, and… yeah. That’s it, I guess.”

Someone leans on the horn behind them. The light is green, and Lup slams the gas pedal, shooting a scowl at the rearview mirror.

“Oh,” is all she says. “Well, okay.”

Taako scoffs. “What, that’s it? You’re—you seriously don’t have anything to say? You’ve been on my case about this for the last week!”

“Well, what do you want me to say, dude? I just wanted a straight answer—”

He snickers.

Lup realizes seconds too late and then, like a reflex, she can’t help but burst out laughing. Taako cracks up, and the two of them cackle maniacally over a very undeserved joke, but if that doesn’t sum it up she has no idea what does. He takes off his glasses to wipe at his eyes, and Lup sucks in a breath, fighting for composure. “Okay. That was pretty bad.”

“Pretty fuckin’ awful,” Taako manages, still teary. He pushes rogue strands of hair off his forehead and says, “I’m, uh, sorry I lied. Or was, just—I dunno. A prick. I didn’t mean to be, this—” He brandishes the phone at her, for once absent any text notifications. “This isn’t even anything, I dunno what the fuck I was thinking.”

“You wouldn’t have acted like a prick if this was nothing, ’Ko.”

He rolls his eyes. “Okay, full stop. We’re not doing car ride relationship counseling. Been there, done that, and all it does is make me motion-sick.”

Lup just grins. “You called it a relationship. You know you’re gonna have to spill all the deets when we get home, right? You know there’s _no way_ you’re getting out of this one?”

“Oh, my _God_ ,” Taako mumbles into his hands. “Christ. Please shut the fuck up and drive.”

She makes a point of staring at him, mouth slightly agape with shock overdone to the max. “Did you just say _please_?”

“I’m going to die now. I wish I never met you.”

"I know, and I love you anyway."


	7. nacho problem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lup takes a night off. Lucretia wins a bet. The NSDT goes bowling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're halfway there! it's been so good to get back to these wonderful debate team kids, and i hope you're enjoying this sweet slice-of-life au as much as i am.
> 
> to all my midwestern friends, and everybody else getting slammed with snow, stay warm out there!

They turn onto a particularly crowded street, and amid the radio’s quiet crackling, Taako says, “I’m actually gonna kill you in real life.”

“Good luck with that,” is all Lup says. “I’m a badass.”

“Got that half right,” he says, and then yelps as Lup reaches over the gear shift to whack him in the chest. She sits back, grinning, and promptly hits the brakes as the car in front of them comes to a sudden stop. “ _Fuck_ —yeah, but… seriously. I didn’t mean to push you or anything. If you didn’t want to tell me, you shouldn’t have told me.”

Taako huffs with amusement and perches his glasses back on his nose. “Okay, that’s bullshit and you know it. We’re all up in each other’s business all the time, uh, anyway, okay? Besides, even if I hadn’t told you, you woulda figured it out yourself, right?”

She’ll concede to that. Lup’s deductive skills will never win her a future internship at the Neverwinter investigative division (that honor belongs to Angus, who’d wowed several visiting detectives with his conclusions as to their whereabouts the night before), but she’s smart enough to make the right kinds of assumptions, particularly when it comes to her brother’s love life. And he pays her back in full, of course. It’s been a few years, but she hasn’t forgotten about the Great Guessing Game of sophomore year.

“Yeah,” she says, eventually. “Okay, yeah.”

Before Taako can smugly pronounce that he knows her too well, et cetera, their phones buzz as one. As of now, it doesn’t look like their car is going anywhere, so Lup picks up hers. There’s just one notification from their official NSDT group chat, currently titled _shrimp heaven_ , although it’s also the third title they’ve been through in a week.

 _marchis burchins - 4:52 PM  
_ _heyyyy you guys should join us at the bowling alley!!! jules’ team is competing so they’ve got a discount on bowling and food for everybody else and it’s super cool_

 _flip wizard - 4:53 PM  
_ _dude we just saw each other why r u telling us this now_

 _marchis burchins - 4:54 PM  
_ _i forgot ://///_

 _marchis burchins - 4:54 PM  
_ _but you guys should come by and hang out!! the team is gonna start at 5 and they’ve got pizza and other good stuff and we could have a lil celebration_

Taako’s eyes flick up from the screen, and he raises an eyebrow at Lup. She raises one right back. Her backpack is stuffed with worksheets that require nothing but a basic knowledge of the textbook they’re using, and consequently the ability to regurgitate that knowledge into a couple fill-in-the-blanks. She’s well ahead on the classes that matter, and even then, it’s only one night. One night to take her mind off everything, to grill Taako about his new beau, to re-energize and eat some crappy bowling alley food and forget about the future.

Traffic starts to move. Lup’s phone is lighting up again, and she glances it over again to see a harried agreement from Lucretia, followed by _barold j bluejeans is typing_. Taako shrugs, leaning back in his seat. “I’m up for it if you are.”

Miraculously, the car they’ve been stuck behind starts to move forward. Something in Lup’s brain kicks into gear—evidently the bit that makes split-second decisions, because she flicks her turning signal and maneuvers narrowly into the left turn lane, thoroughly irritating a good few minivans behind her. “Honestly,” she says, moreso to herself than to Taako, “I could use a night off.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

She turns a suspicious eye on him as her car takes the turn with the shriek of rubber against asphalt. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, you’ve just… you’ve been, uh, stressed. I can tell.” He shrugs again, eyes glued stubbornly to his phone screen. “And what with this—this haircut thing, it’s just obvious that something’s up, okay?”

A twinge of guilt rockets through Lup’s chest. “Hey, I know you were goofing around about it, but I’m really sorry about the haircut. I should’ve told you.”

“Hey, no worries,” says Taako, and he sounds like he means it. “It looks good.”

She swallows the unease building in her throat and preens, carding a hand through the gel-soft strands. “It does, doesn’t it?”

“Well, don’t you go getting full of yourself,” he says, and the irony is laid on so thick that Lup can’t help but laugh.

* * *

Every town seems to have a bowling alley that no one pays much attention to. Outwardly, it’s not a terribly interesting thing. Neverwinter’s bowling alley, inexplicably named _The Adventure Zone_ and relentlessly mocked for said name, is a boxy, nondescript building that sits on the edge of a corporate park. It’s also quite possibly the least interesting-looking place in town, which is all the more reason for high school students to make it their hangout of choice. If anything, the psychedelic lighting and 80’s Spotify radio make it an easy target to make fun of, and as Lup well knows, there’s nothing high school students like more than making fun of things.

Even in the ambiently dark space, it doesn’t take them very long to find the NSDT, in part because Magnus stands up on the booth and waves at them from across the alley. “ _Over here_!” he yells, and then wobbles and nearly falls on his face thanks to a nudge from the broad-shouldered girl next to him. She grins wickedly and then salutes Lup and Taako, who pick their way across a stretch of carpeting that looks like it’s trying to insult the color wheel. “Get over here, you two! We got nachos!”

“Those things are not _nachos_ ,” says Taako pointedly as they reach the table. “They’re chips covered in cheese.”

Julia Waxman yanks Magnus down next to her and raises an eyebrow. She’s dressed in the black and burnished gold of the Neverwinter bowling team, bushy locks tied up in a futile-looking ponytail, and she plucks a nacho from the basket at the center of the table as she says, “That’s what nachos _are_.”

“No, it’s—it’s the principle of the thing, and these just _don’t_ —”

“You guys came!” says Magnus, beaming. “First ones, too!”

Lup slides into the booth and takes a nacho. “Couldn’t pass up a chance to see _the_ Julia Waxman herself kick some ass. Speaking of which, where’s the team?”

“Prepping,” says Julia, and tips her head toward the other side of the alley. A small section has been roped off with fake, shiny caution tape that says _NOW ENTERING THE PARTY ZONE!_ , and behind it Lup can make out a cluster of girls in black and gold. She turns back just as Magnus’s girlfriend shoots them a conspicuous wink. “I don’t need to prep, of course, because I’m just that good.”

Magnus bounces in his seat. “ _Hell_ yeah.”

“Nah, but in all seriousness, great to see you guys, but I gotta go.” She kisses Magnus’s cheek and stands up, snagging one more nacho for good measure. “Say hi to the rest of the nerd brigade for me, mkay?”

Taako makes an offended noise, but Julia just laughs and heads for her team. Magnus watches her go, a distinctly dreamy glaze over his eyes. “God,” he says, “she’s amazing. Like, she’s amazing, right? She’s just… amazing.”

“Lame,” says Lup, and then cackles and dodges a suddenly airborne nacho. It hits the side of the booth and slides, leaving a gooey, cheesy residue in its wake, just as Lucretia appears with Barry in tow. She looks from the lactose-laden projectile to Lup, Taako, and Magnus, who are all snickering softly, and says, “Look at this. I leave for half an hour and my debate team starts a turf war.”

“Correction,” Lup interjects, holding up a finger. “ _Magnus_ started a turf war.”

“Hey, I didn’t—!”

“ _Alright_ ,” says Taako. “I’m breaking this shit up before it gets started. Mags, ’Creesh, lowest bowling score pays for the apps, what d’you say?”

Magnus breaks into a wide grin, one that Lup recognizes after three years of watching him get overly competitive in everything from the regional championships to who can stomach the most hot sauce on their burrito. “You’re _so_ on.”

“Excellent. C’mon.” He clambers ungracefully over Magnus, who grabs his sleeve, and the resulting struggle is enough to rattle the nacho basket as they both race for the nearby lane. Lucretia opens her mouth, undoubtedly trying to formulate an excuse—she’s wicked fast in shooting back when it comes to their debates, but something about Taako and Magnus’s antics apparently get the best of her—and then seems to give up with a hapless shrug.

“Well,” she says. “I’m sure as fuck not paying for the appetizers.” And with a brisk nod, the NSDT’s president goes to tear up the bowling scene.

Lup whistles as she joins Magnus and Taako at an open lane, then turns back to Barry, who’s watching them with an endeared, endearing grin. “What’re you waiting around for?” she says. “C’mere.”

Barry does, sliding into the booth and leaning to avoid the lines of chip and cheese streaking the seat. “Hey,” he says, and his tone of voice alone is enough to make Lup want to lean forward and kiss him. She does, with a shitty, sappy smile—one of the pitfalls of relationships, it seems—and sits back with that same smile lingering on her face. “How did you get over here, anyway?”

He shoots an embarrassed glance off to the side. “Lucretia. She picked me up on her way over.”

“You know that _so_ doesn’t work, right? Like, she’s gay and she drives, and you’re bi and you don’t, so isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?”

“Lup,” says Barry, looking mildly offended. “I’m not a statistic.”

Lup bursts into laughter and flicks a shard of corn chip at him. He deflects, grinning, and looks past her towards the rest of the NSDT, who are just starting their first round. Lucretia is dual-wielding bowling balls, and Magnus is holding two—one rust-red, one a vibrant purple, which means he’s carrying Taako’s as well. Across the floor, Julia’s team clamors as she lines up her shot and sends her ball careening down their lane. Magnus pauses mid-swing to shout " _Go, Jules_!" at the top of his lungs, just as the ball hits and knocks down all ten pins. The team erupts into raucous cheering, and Magnus releases a triumphant yell, nearly decapitating Taako with his own ball as he jumps up and down in excitement.

Barry chuckles. “It’ll be their… uh, their one-year anniversary on Saturday, won’t it?”

“Uh—” Lup’s almost ashamed to admit she has no idea. “Really? I kinda can’t believe you remember that.”

He shrugs a little awkwardly, eyes fixed on Julia’s celebrating team. The other team already looks hopeless, even though they’re not even one round in. “I guess I just have a mind for that stuff, huh?”

Somehow, he really does, Lup thinks. His little considerations had been one of the first things she’d noticed about him.

* * *

_When she and Taako get to the classroom, still debating over the merits of pulling a switch on their substitute, everyone is crowded around a single desk—including Merle, which is when Lup knows this is momentous. He doesn’t get up for just anything, and as they get closer, she sees what the something is. A platter of misshapen chocolate chip cookies sits atop the desk, and standing next to it is Barry, who looks up when they approach and re-adjusts his glasses. “Hey,” he says, and smiles. “It’s, uh, Magnus’s birthday, so I thought I’d bring in a treat. ’S not much, but, uh… I think they turned out well.”_

_Lup looks to Magnus, halfway through a cookie which is, judging by the crumbs around his mouth, not even close to his first. “Oh. Happy birthday, Mags.”_

_“Thanks!” He beams at her through a mouthful of cookie. “These are fuckin’ awesome, and get this—Barry got me a spot to volunteer at the animal shelter! I get—” Magnus drops his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I get to hang out with the dogs. This is the best day of my life.”_

_Barry scratches the back of his neck. “Yeah, I… I wanted to get you peanut butter, Magnus, because I know that’s one of your faves, but I figured with Taako’s peanut allergy…”_

_Taako nudges Lup and whispers, “Since when are we spreading my vulnerabilities around all willy-nilly?”_

_She just shrugs, because despite having her finger on the pulse, she doesn’t have a clue as to how Barry would know about Taako’s allergy. He’s barely spoken all of the four meetings they’ve had so far—in fact, before now, she wasn’t sure he knew all of their names. But there he is, asking Lucretia about her journalism assessment and nibbling on a cookie, and playing it off like it doesn’t mean anything. Like being thoughtful and sweet is just something he does, no questions asked, no payback required._

_Lup realizes she’s staring when Taako shoves a cookie into her hand. “What are you doing?” he says. “It’s free food!”_

_“Right, right,” she murmurs, without tearing her gaze away from Barry. He catches her eye just once, and his lips twitch up into an awkward smile, and then he turns his attention back to Lucretia. Lup watches with something like wonder._

_People aren’t just like that. People are good, but they’re also flawed and self-serving and sometimes they don’t care enough about their own family to bother sticking around for longer than a week. Taako doesn’t share her entire sentiment; in fact, he’s more inclined to say that people suck, period. She likes to think she’s got a little hope, but this catches her more off-guard than she’d like to admit._

_Barry isn’t doing this for a reward, or acceptance, or to be acknowledged by one of the school’s most popular kids._

_He’s just—kind._

* * *

Back in the present, Barry points out that Magnus has been working on his backswing, and Lup smiles and nods because, yeah, he has. They watch their three fellow members talk smack and challenge each other to strike out backwards, or with their eyes closed (all bets Magnus takes, all money he’s sure to lose to Taako). Another roar goes up from the far lane—one of Julia’s teammates lands a spare. It’s all so completely mundane and a little obnoxious, because bowling alleys are always a little obnoxious, and Lup’s mind isn’t feeling as cluttered for once. She relaxes and listens to Barry launch into a discussion of their latest physics project, which they’ve somehow convinced the teacher to partner them up on (she’d swore it would never happen again after the pyrotechnics incident of first quarter, but they’re both pretty damn persuasive when they need to be). He’s already got pages’ worth of ideas and it’s surprisingly relaxing to listen to.

Of course, then he notices her eyes glazing over, and says, “C’mon, I’m not _that_ boring, am I?”

Lup shoves him lightly. “No fucking way. Just, uh… just thinking. Did I tell you I decided on dramatic extemp for the competition?”

“Really?” Barry’s voice pitches up with unease. “I mean, not that you can do it, because you can, but… we got two weeks. You think you can be ready by then?”

“ ’Course,” she says, and nudges him again. “Who d’you think you’re talking to?”

He smiles down at his lap, which is another thing he does when he’s not convinced. She’s been seeing a lot of those tells, recently, and it’s starting to eat at her, because it’s like he knows something that she doesn’t. (Apart from what household ingredients can be used in an attempted resurrection. She’s tried to get him to share his recipe several times, to no avail.)

Lup’s getting real, _real_ sick of not knowing shit.

She opens her mouth—mostly to ask him what the problem is, in part because she’s not so sure of it herself—when a shout goes up from the lane nearby, followed by a hearty groan. Taako and Lucretia high-five, and he cups his hands over his mouth to yell towards Lup and Barry at the table. “Get some food going over there! Magnus is payin’!”

“But I’m broke!”

“We’re all broke, you dumbass, we’re high school students! This is why you don’t lose wagers!”

Barry gives a low whistle at the scoreboard. Lucretia’s name sits at the top after a single round, followed closely by Taako’s, and she smiles smugly as she maneuvers her way back over to the table. “I told you I wasn’t paying.”

“Go, Luce!” Lup claps and flags down one of the exhausted-looking teenagers in a striped shirt, which is just as ugly as the carpeting in every other possible way. “Hey, can we get some, uh… some French fries, and five milkshakes!”

Magnus groans again. “I’m gonna go bankrupt!”

“It’s, like, ten bucks, you baby,” she says, shifting over to make room for him and her brother. “I’ve bet more on Greg fuckin’ Grimaldis.”

“ _Ugh_ ,” Taako proclaims, at the same time Lucretia says, “Who’s Greg Grimaldis?”

Lup raises an eyebrow. “I never tell you that story?”

“It’s a saga,” Barry warns.

“Shut up—we were at a lacrosse tournament, he asked me for fifteen dollars for the vending machine ’cause, I dunno, some bullshit lie about low blood sugar. Next thing I know? He moves away, and he _still_ hasn’t paid me back.” Her blood is starting to boil at the very thought. “Never heard from the fuckin’ guy again.”

Lucretia tips her head in thought and says, “I could find him.”

“ _Jesus_ , Luce, what are you, some sorta bounty hunter?”

“Well, I’m not—”

“She didn’t say she _wasn’t_ —”

Barry’s hand finds hers, and with a start, Lup realizes that she’s let her eyes glaze over. Again. “Okay, for real,” he murmurs, as Magnus and Taako start arguing over whether there is evidence as to whether Lucretia _isn’t_ a bounty hunter. From what she can discern, Magnus is for, Taako is against, for no reason other than he likes to be insufferable. “You’re out of it, Lup. Is everything okay, seriously?”

“Yeah,” says Lup, and for the first time since the weekend, she means it. Another cheer sounds from Julia’s team, and Lucretia sputters in protest, and Magnus reaches over Taako’s head for another nacho. She’s surrounded by four incredibly smart idiots in a gaudy, overblown bowling alley and trying not to think about the future, and it’s working. It’s not a permanent solution, but Lup’s decided she really isn’t about permanent solutions—she’s feeling pretty comfortable here, in the moment.

So she threads her fingers through his and leans into his shoulder. “I’m okay, Bear. Promise.”


	8. third time's the charm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lup does some research. Taako gets real. The NSDT prepares to sink or swim.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it sure has been a minute, hasn't it? but we're back, and we're better than ever! happy summer, everyone!

Multitasking has never really been Lup’s _thing_.

She’s always figured it’s because she has too much affinity for everything else. Barry calls her a min-max PC, which she hadn’t understood until he’d introduced her to D&D, and then she’d hit him lightly in the shoulder and complained about him underestimating her abilities because he was _right_ , damn him. Apparently she’d maxed out on argumentation skills, relationships, good looks, and a number of other things, and ended up with a minus-three to multitasking. Her modifier for constructing metaphors can’t be that good, either.

Still, a couple pathetic ability scores won't keep her from trying, and so when the door to her bedroom bangs open, Lup is sitting in front of her computer. One of the open windows reads _DRAMATIC EXTEMPORANEOUS SPEAKING COMPILATION 2017_ , and the other lists a number of increasingly drab-looking scholarships, ranging anywhere from promotional scams to the names of wealthy benefactors and several novel-length requirements. Lup hasn’t looked at the scholarships in a good while. She taps a pencil against the edge of her desk as the video winds on, flipping to a new piece and a speaker in a new school uniform. Ignoring the other window won’t make it go away, but it does mean she doesn’t have to think about it, and she’s decided she’ll settle for that.

Scholarship hunting is really just a formality at this point. Lup and Taako’s grades guarantee them at least two merit awards each, and they’re practically the poster children for financial aid. Taako’s already started to practice his crocodile tears for the interviews when they’re asked about their parents. “I just _know_ ,” he’d told Lup, letting his voice wobble and break. “I know this was the dream they had for us.”

Neither of them have ever been above exploiting their circumstances for money—not when they were little, and certainly not now. Which is why finding booster scholarships should be a piece of cake.

So when the door behind her bounces hard enough against the wall to shake a few plaster chips loose, Lup is almost grateful for the interruption. She swivels in the chair just as Taako flops backward onto her bed, fixing his eyes directly on the ceiling.

“I’m fucked, Lu,” he announces.

Lup reaches behind her to hit the spacebar on her laptop, and the voice filtering through her earbuds is cut short. “Well, shit,” she says. “Did somebody else find out you have actual feelings?”

Taako snags one of her decorative pillows and launches it half-heartedly in her direction. “Fuck off. Tonight, I’m gonna talk, and you’re gonna listen, mkay?”

Listening is sounding pretty good to Lup, who at this point would rather deal with any other voice than her own. She tugs out her earbuds and offers up the best non-judgmental gaze she can muster, even though they both know damn well she’s going to judge all she likes. “Okay,” she says. “Talk away.”

Taako exhales and practically melts into the mattress. She’s not used to seeing him like this—he complains constantly about how exhausted he is, but him showing visible signs of exhaustion is a rare thing. “I’ve got a problem,” he says, and he actually sounds like he means it. “I dunno if I want—if I want solutions, or what, but I gotta tell somebody before I lose my fuckin’ mind.”

Lup’s about to make a snarky quip about talking his way around the problem before he’s even mentioned it, but a little voice at the back of her head reminds her that Taako’s always more open when he’s given the space to be. Besides, she’s got no desire to hurry this along; not when the only thing waiting for her at the end of this conversation is a laundry list of scholarships and ridiculously mainstream essay prompts. Just the prospect of returning to her search is enough to turn her stomach.

So she keeps her mouth shut. Whatever it is, Taako will talk about it in his own time.

Sure enough, it only takes another moment or two before he breaks the silence. “This guy,” he says. “Kravitz. I think, uh… I think I like him. For real.”

Lup doesn’t say anything, which turns out to be the right move. “We’ve been on three dates now,” Taako continues. “And he’s just— _fuck_ , Lu, he’s sweet and kind ’n shit, and he’s actually interested in me and—and what I’ve got to say, and he’s the biggest nerd on the planet, but, like, I might be kinda into that? I mean, you remember him, right? He’s like—like, he wants to be a _conductor_. Like, of an _orchestra_. That’s nerdy as shit and I actually kinda love it.”

He shifts over to lay on his stomach, resting the heels of his hands on his forehead in a way that makes him look like a model for someone’s portrait of despair. “And y’know how, like—I mean, three dates, you’d figure somethin’ woulda happened by now, right? But it hasn’t. Because I actually care. I don’t wanna rush into things with him, or anything, because he deserves better than that, and—ugh. _Fuck_. Are you hearing this? Who the _fuck_ am I?”

“I think,” says Lup, “you might be a guy with a crush.”

“Nuh-uh. No way. Taako doesn’t _do_ crushes.” He lifts his head from his hands and says, “You saw what happened last time I got in deep with somebody. You remember.”

* * *

_Fuck spring break, Lup thinks. It’s a single week during the school year that’s supposed to serve as an interlude, but instead ends up a liminal space stuffed to the brim with impulse decisions and seasonal despair. There’s just enough time to mangle sleep schedules, to make plans and let them wilt under the lukewarm sun. There’s just enough time to figure out how to break into their cousin’s liquor cabinet._

_Taako’s fingers twitch weakly when she lifts the bottle out of his hands. “No,” is all he can manage, and even that’s barely coherent through the thick slur that coats his words._

_Lup steps back and narrowly avoids putting her heel through another bottle, completely drained of whatever had been in it. She swears under her breath and sets them both on the nightstand. “How many?”_

_“Mm.”_

_“How many, Taako?” It’s hard to keep her voice down when she’s as furious as she is, but they can’t afford to get thrown out of another house. “They’re gonna kill you. You know that, right?”_

_“Doesn’t matter,” Taako murmurs. “Nothin’ matters.”_

_“Okay, I don’t—” She takes a deep breath and pushes down all the anger and frustration rolling in her stomach. Of course the one night she goes to tutor Magnus is the one night everything goes to shit. “Listen. Whatever you guys got into this time, you can’t just drink it away, okay? We’ve talked about this. You gotta—”_

_“We’re not together,” says Taako, into a pillow. “Not, uh… not anymore.”_

_Lup blinks. There’s a part of her that wants to jump for joy and set off the fireworks in her sock drawer, but there’s another, much larger part of her that goes instantly cold with fear. “What happened?”_

_He curls in on himself, fingers still grasping at air like he’s itching to take a sip of something alcoholic. “Bad fight. Real bad. He’s a… a piece’a shit. ’M done with his bullshit. Not worth it.”_

_That’s surprisingly and almost worryingly reasonable, but Lup decides for now, she’ll take it. “Okay,” she says, and sits next to him on the bed. His head lolls like he’s trying to look up at her, but his glassy eyes settle on the nightstand. “We’ll talk about how stupid this was later, okay? I’m proud of you for getting rid of him. It must’ve really sucked.”_

_“My fault,” is his mumbled response._

_“Yeah,” she says, carding a few soothing fingers through his hair. “You were both jackasses. But you’re a jackass who deserves better than him.”_

* * *

 “That shit doesn’t fly around here anymore,” says Taako.

Lup does remember. Last year’s spring break is pretty hard to forget.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s just think about that for a second, though. How likely is it that this guy is going to be an exact repeat of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named?”

“Well—well, that’s the thing, Lu, I dunno! Because fuckin’ He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named seemed perfectly great in the beginning, super nice ’n all that, until he turned out to be a major-league asshole with major-league possession issues! Can’t trust anybody,” he adds. “That’s been my philosophy ever since and it hasn’t exactly let me down yet, y’know?”

“You trust the NSDT,” Lup points out.

“Yeah, they’re… they’re different. They’re like you. Less friends, more, uh… more family. _You fuck with them, you fuck with me_ vibes. Shut up,” Taako interjects, even though he’s not at an angle that he can see Lup’s wide grin. “I’m being _vulnerable_ ’n shit, and this is how you repay me?”

“Okay, but real talk,” Lup says, biting back her grin. “Love and all that is about taking risks. You’re never gonna get anything back if you don’t risk shit breaking bad every now and then. You think I wasn’t terrified when I asked Barry out? What if he’d kicked me to the curb? I’d never want to show my face at debate club again.”

Taako scoffs. “Nice attempt at being relatable, but you were _not_ scared. Not being able to shut up about something doesn’t—that doesn’t make you scared.”

She arches an eyebrow at him. “You sure about that?”

“I—alright, fine, point taken. But ch’boy ain’t here to take risks. Ch’boy is here to have a good time, and _love_ , or whatever, is deffo _not_ a good time.”

“Speak for yourself,” says Lup. “It seems pretty damn good to me.”

Taako doesn’t respond, but he looks like he’s actually contemplating her words. And it’s not like Lup hasn’t figured it at this point, but that’s when she _really_ knows that this is serious. It’s even more than that, really—it’s real.

* * *

They’ve got two weeks until the competition, which means it's crunch time.

Lucretia gathers them for the Monday meeting and says they’re going to be gathering materials and working on presentation, which has almost everyone slumping a little in their seats. There are few things more exhilarating than performing in front of a crowd, but the buildup involves copious amounts of research and tweaking, which can’t even begin to compare. Lup’s restlessness grips her like a metal clamp around her chest.

She finds their intrepid president talking to Barry, the only member of the NSDT who thrives on crunch time and its notorious amount of book work. Besides his status as fearless researcher, he’s also known as a supplier of bizarre and offbeat facts that the NSDT uses to throw off their opponent’s game. More often than not, the facts are the unfortunate sort that make everyone else wish they’d never grown a pair of ears. Lup loves them almost as much as she loves Barry.

He’s telling Lucretia something about the probability of ingesting harmful chemicals on a daily basis when Lup taps her shoulder. The poor thing looks almost grateful to be pulled away, but she tells Barry to keep at it with a smile that’s just two inches from being pained.

“Your boyfriend,” she says, as soon as they’re out of earshot, “and don’t take this the wrong way, but he’s really one of the fucking _strangest_ people I’ve ever met.”

“Thanks,” says Lup, grinning proudly in Barry’s direction. “I know.”

“Anyway, uh—you looked kind of antsy while I was on my spiel.” Lucretia tends not to be the most perceptive person in the world, and her foresight can _definitely_ use some work, but for once she’s spot on. “What’s up?”

“Ah, it’s nothing, really.” Because it isn’t—it’s some whim of the universe that Lup’s decided to listen to, for once. “Just that I’m probably gonna do some dramatic extemp this year.”

Lucretia blinks. “You’re, uh… you’re changing your category? This close to the competition?”

“I know it’s kind of a dumbass thing to do, but I just feel like I _gotta_ , y’know?” She wonders if Lucretia, one of the most impulsive-on-paper people she’s ever known, picks up what she’s putting down. “I want to do something unexpected this year. Stuff I haven’t done for a long time, or, y’know, ever. The judges like when they’re caught off guard, don’t they? We both know how tired they get of listening to the same old stuff.”

The way Lucretia barely swallows a cringe means she knows exactly what Lup is talking about. “Surprise is always better than boredom,” she says. “I mean, if you feel like you’ll be prepared enough to extemp something in two weeks, I’ll support you. God knows you’re talented enough to pull it off.”

“Aww, _Luce_ —”

“But that means you have to _haul ass_ ,” their president adds, picks up a stack of books from a nearby desk, and drops it into Lup’s arms. The one sitting at the top says _DRAMATIC EXTEMPORANEOUS SPEAKING: PROMPTS, TIPS, AND TRICKS FOR ORGANIZATION_. “Get organizing, Lup. We’ll talk after you have a concrete outline.”

Lup sticks out her tongue, and Lucretia returns it in full as she turns on her heel and makes her way over to where Magnus is sitting with another mountain of books. With a long sigh, Lup hefts her own materials in her arms and goes to find a quiet spot along the wall. _Quiet_ in the NSDT’s classroom is relative, of course; it’s always buzzing with discussion and debate and wholehearted arguments over whether haunted dolls can actually be purchased on Ebay. She could do with some of the white noise, she’ll admit. It’s one of the few things keeping her from dwelling too much on college, or scholarships, or the scholarship essays that sit unfinished on her computer.

Taako tosses a comparatively slender book onto the desk next to her and flops into the seat. He eyes her and her small library and says, “ ’Cretia’s putting you on your grind, huh?”

“As any good president should,” says Lup. Taako’s book has a cartoonish speech bubble on the front, with the accompanying title of _I’LL BE HERE ALL WEEK: A COLLECTION OF COMEDIC MONOLOGUES_. “Comedy, huh?”

“Yeah. _Improv debate_ —I dunno what I was thinking. I’m not arguing circles with some prissy private school kid.” He cracks open the book and taps one acrylic against the cover. “I’ll probably hate myself for doing somethin’ with memorization, but sometimes that’s just how it be on this bitch of an earth.”

Lup grins to herself and runs a finger down the spines of her different texts, trying to distinguish the least mind-numbing from its serious-looking colleagues. Taako’s phone is sitting on his desk, and when it buzzes, it’s unnaturally loud and rattles the entire structure.

“Shit,” he mumbles, and unlocks it with one hand as he props the comedy book in the other. Lup watches as he smiles a small, closed-lip smile and taps out a reply, then puts the phone on Do Not Disturb and returns to reading.

“So,” she says, as casually as possible. “Who was that?”

“The boyfriend,” says Taako, without looking up from his book. “Just settled on our fourth date.”


	9. hit the books

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lup revisits the future. Barry uses an idiom. The NSDT gets ready to rumble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and now back to your regularly scheduled programming! i'd like to truly, earnestly apologize for how long it's taken me to update this fic—as it turns out, uni is hard, but getting inspired is even harder.
> 
> nevertheless, i haven't given up on this fic, and my hope is that you haven't either. to anyone else who, like me, is currently buried under a foot of snow, stay warm out there!

When it comes to every other high schooler on the planet, Fridays are chill. They’re a _thank-God-we-made-it_ day, a _homework-can-wait_ day, a _spill-the-tea-and-top-off-the-coffee_ day.

For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till graduation does she depart, Lup is not every other high schooler.

By the end of the day, she’s had to all but mute her phone, which hasn’t stopped buzzing since sixth period and doesn’t seem intent on shutting up any time soon. She loves Lucretia with all her heart—she _really_ does—but their president can’t text for shit, especially when it comes to getting them organized. Lup’s notifications are new every time she steals a glance at them.

 _Luce - 2:41 PM  
_ _Remember, don’t come to the meeting!! We’re meeting at the library after school today for our late-nighter_

 _Luce - 2:41 PM  
_ _The Neverwinter library_

 _Luce - 2:42 PM  
_ _On Silver & 2nd _

_Luce - 2:43 PM  
_ _At 5pm_

Everyone else has just stopped responding at this point, and honestly, Lup doesn’t blame them. It’s been so long that they’ve all forgotten what the 24-hour crunch is like, but the more she thinks about it, the more she remembers that this is pretty much par for the course.

At any rate, Lucretia’s made it _agonizingly_ clear that they don’t have a meeting today, so for once, Lup leaves school with everyone else. Getting to the main doors is like fighting to hold her own in a tidal wave of vape smoke and stale lip gloss. Taako meets her in the parking lot, and he’s got his phone out—texting two-handed instead of one, which is how Lup knows it’s serious. His expression is softened into a tiny, lopsided grin that she’s just started to get used to.

“What’s crackin’, Romeo?”

“Test me,” he drawls, without missing a beat. Lup snickers and nudges him gently in the shoulder before climbing up into the driver’s seat.

Apart from the white-noise notifications from their group chat, the drive home is surprisingly uneventful. So are the next few hours, as Taako warms up a frozen pizza (because of the late-nighter, he insists; it’s the only reason he can’t be bothered to whip up some _real_ food) and Lup slogs through a few scholarship applications. _Tell us about your family history_ , says one of the prompts. _How would you solve world hunger?_ says another. _In 500 words or less._

With all due respect to academia, she’s really starting to wonder if the people who come up with these essay questions have ever tried to answer them. She’s halfway through a long-winded, deeply tragic retelling of her and her brother’s childhood when she highlights and deletes it all on an impulse, then stares longingly at the blank document in front of her. Student debt is looking more appealing all the time.

Fuck family history. These universities aren’t looking for a novella, and they _definitely_ aren’t looking for real talk. Lup devours a few slices of pizza as she outlines her seven-point plan for eliminating world hunger, and at some point Taako _probably_ says he’s going to change and wait for her in the car, but she’s too deep in the implications of international political alliances to process it. And then it’s 4:45. She tosses her laptop onto her bed, scavenges her comfiest pair of sneakers from the closet, and scrawls a note to leave on the kitchen counter— _Debate stuff. Back late._ That’ll have to do.

When she slides into the driver’s seat, Taako has his feet up on the dashboard, bobbing his heel to a song crackling through the radio. His braid is loose and unkempt, and he wears mauve leggings under a large, dark sweatshirt that Lup doesn’t recognize. She pokes him as she buckles her seatbelt. “Where’d you get that from?”

“Krav,” says Taako. “I think. I probably left with it on or somethin’, but he doesn’t care.”

“Is he coming tomorrow?” She throws the car in reverse and backs out of the driveway. The tires screech as she jerks the wheel and sets off down the street.

When she looks back over, he’s not looking at her, but at the road ahead, shaded with overgrown trees that are just now starting to wilt. “Uh, yeah,” he says, and his voice is _way_ too soft. “Pretty sure.”

Lup’s mouth curls in a massively satisfied smirk. “Somebody’s got it _bad_ ,” she sings, and promptly takes a punch to the shoulder. Taako settles back in his seat, completely blasé. “I’m not taking shit from your sappy ass, nuh-uh,” he says. “Besides, one of us is dating a guy with style.”

“Kravitz is a fuckin’ dork, Taako. Doesn’t he know how to do the Charleston? Am I remembering that right?”

“At least he’s heard of something other than denim.”

“I’m not doing this with some goth boy’s gaudy-ass trophy boyfriend.”

“Okay, you—you said that like it’s something to be ashamed of. I thought you knew me better than that, Lulu.”

“Test me,” says Lup, and slams the brakes in front of a red light. She cracks a grin, and out of the corner of their eye she can see Taako doing the same. He breaks first, and then they’re both giggling, which is more a result of sleep deprivation and stress than anything else, but it feels good. Cathartic. The stress of those _fucking_ scholarships is driving needles through her skull.

Finally, Taako regains his composure, and says, “Besides, if anyone’s the arm candy, it’s him.”

He’s joking, but Lup can’t shake her grin. She sighs as the light turns green and says, “You two are so fucking good. You know that, right?”

That earns her an odd look. “What’s with the feelings all of a sudden?”

“Nothing,” says Lup, as casually as she can. She swings their car around the curb and speeds towards the library. That’s the truth—it _is_ nothing, isn’t it? There’s no reason for her to be getting real.

It’s quiet for some time. Longer than Lup is comfortable with.

She’s about to say something asinine—about the weather, maybe, or the latest lab report—when Taako says, “Something’s up with you.”

“What? I’m fine.”

He shakes his head. “Don’t bullshit me, Lu. I got—I know when something’s going on. You worried about the competition? Because you know you’re gonna fuckin’ crush it, right?”

Lup takes a turn a little faster than she should, which is saying something, and narrowly avoids the curb as she maneuvers the car through the parking lot. “Duh.”

“So what’s this whole vibe for?”

She pulls into a space and yanks the parking brake a little too hard. They sit for a moment in more silence, which she _really_ doesn’t like—she’s so fucking sick of silence, it’s boring as hell and it doesn’t accomplish anything. But she can’t make herself say anything.

It’s like she’s just frozen up.

“How d’you feel about college?” she says.

“Like I’m gonna smoke those fools,” says Taako. “Why?”

And that does it.

Maybe it’s the competition, maybe it’s the prospect of the late-nighter, maybe it’s the scholarship applications and their prompts that want her to fix all the world’s problems and then some. She’d compare it to having a blindfold lifted if it hadn’t just been her kidding herself this whole time. Taako’s supposed to be the one with denial issues, not her. Lup is better than this. She’s supposed to have it together.

She’s supposed to be _ready_ for this, and yet—

“I’m not okay,” she blurts. “Okay? I just… I changed my topic at the last minute, and I’ve been putting off these applications, and cutting my _fucking_ hair, and it’s all because something feels wrong. It’s college. Or the idea of leaving, I don’t… I don’t know. I don’t wanna be one of those people who never graduates, y’know? But the NSDT is my family, Taako, Jesus. And this is the last year I’ll have with them, and Barry, and…”

The brake feels ready to snap under the pressure of Lup’s foot. “I know we’re always gonna have each other,” she says. “I get that. All of this just means too much to me. It’ll never be enough to preserve in some fucking yearbook.”

More silence. She’s going to find whoever is responsible for silence and punch their teeth out. The car is parked now, but it’s still running, and she’s gripping the wheel hard enough to turn all her knuckles white.

“Yeah,” says Taako, finally. “I get that.”

Her gaze snaps to his. There’s not even a hint of judgment or sarcasm in his face.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he says, and drums his acrylics against the windowsill. “I mean, I didn’t, but then Krav and I were talking about uni, and it was something really dumb, y’know? Like—like that his high school had some clubs that his college didn’t, and he was thinking about starting one of ’em himself… and I just kinda realized we won’t be here next year. And that it was kinda, uh… it’s a trip.”

That’s one way of putting it. “Definitely a trip,” Lup echoes, and sighs.

They sit in another lull, and then she says, “I didn’t know you thought that far ahead.”

“Neither did I.” Taako turns and raises an eyebrow in her direction. “You’re not, like, bottling this shit, right? You know you can, uh… you can talk to me about. Uh.”

He waves his hand vaguely, and Lup cracks a smile. That’s what she gets for opening up to her emotionally constipated baby brother. Still, her emotionally constipated baby brother is making an effort, for her sake, and that’s not nothing.

“I know,” she says, and nudges him again. “And y’know you can talk to me about _uh_ , and all the other stuff. Including your love life.”

“ _Ugh_ ,” says Taako, emphatically, but he’s not back to factory default just yet. “Just… I dunno. I get where you’re coming from. And shit’s crazy right now, but if you want, we can—we can talk feelings sometime. Y’know?”

Damn, he loves her. It’s not always at the forefront of Lup’s mind, but Taako really loves her.

“I know,” she says. Then she arches her back, releases her hands from the wheel, and pushes open the door. “C’mon, babe. Let’s fucking do this thing.”

* * *

Late-nighters are practically a staple of NSDT culture at this point, which means everyone’s got expectations. Lucretia shows up with a cooler of black coffee. Barry arrives with fifty tabs open on his laptop and a stack of archived research papers. Magnus goes straight to the front desk and trades gossip with the librarians until Taako remembers to drag him away.

Immediately Lup commandeers a table. She loves the library—there’s something about the green glass lamps and lofted ceiling that makes her feel like she’s slipped out of time. Granted, she can never admit it to _anyone_ , because that’s some next-level nerd shit, but the instant Lup settles into a stiff wooden chair and puts her feet up, she starts to feel like herself again.

Maybe she was overreacting in the car, she thinks, as she opens her laptop. She’s too young for existential crises, and besides, she’s acting like she’s the only high school senior in the world who’s ever lost a few of their marbles over the prospect of university. Maybe everything’s fine, Lup thinks. Maybe she’s just blowing it all out of proportion.

And then Barry sits next to her, arms overflowing with papers and looking just slightly out of breath, and Lup realizes that, _fuck_ , she’s really not.

“Hey,” he says. “You ready to burn the midnight oil?”

“Idiom of the day?”

“It’s a cool app!” says Barry, defensively. “You get points if you use it in normal conversation, and then you can buy shit for your little avatar dude.”

Lup brings up a blank document and squints dubiously at him. “Can’t you just lie?”

“I mean, yeah, but it’s an honor system, and I’d feel really bad—”

“Hey, Buzzfeed Unsolved!” Taako lets go of a protesting Magnus’s collar and collapses into the chair across from Lup. “We crackin’ the books or what?”

They end up four to a table. Lucretia takes a desk nearby, which is probably for the best, because she’s got enough notebooks and reading material to drown a small child. Lup doesn’t even _want_ to know what she’s reading in those dusty, leather-bound volumes. She has the distinct feeling it’ll end up with her dead in a magical glade in West Virginia.

So instead, she does her research, and it’s agonizing. That’s putting it nicely. She’d forgotten how much concentration it takes to read through guides to improvisation and silently outline, rehearse, and execute a few extemporaneous pieces of her own, and around 11:00, Lup’s lost herself in her own little world. She goes to add another topic to her list of possible subjects and knocks Barry’s coffee thermos, which wobbles and _almost_ makes an earth-shattering noise before she catches it.

“Rad,” Lup whispers to herself.

And then she looks around, because all of a sudden she’s back in reality. Magnus is facedown in a book, which Lup is guessing isn’t some new, innovative reading technique, and Taako has his head cradled in the crook of his elbow. Next to her, Barry is snoring softly. Lucretia’s curled herself around the edge of the desk and what is definitely not a spellbook.

Lup cracks a smile and tastes saltwater on her upper lip.

She’s crying. _Shit_. Why is she crying?

Well. Fine. She knows why she’s crying—because it’s the middle of the night, and she’s exhausted, and surrounded by people she loves, and she’s just spent the afternoon worrying about the fact that they’ll never have anything like this again. Who wouldn’t?

Across the table, Taako stirs and disturbs a small mountain of books. Lup swallows a knot of emotion in her throat and swipes a hand across her eyes.

“Hey, dumbass.” She pokes him, and he startles awake. Two of the books go toppling to the floor. “We gotta go home and get some sleep.”

“I don’ sleep,” Taako slurs, which is followed promptly by an enormous yawn and a catlike stretch. He fumbles for Barry’s thermos, which has to be empty at this point, and says, “I just need some fuckin’ caffeine.”

She rolls her eyes. If they’re red, Taako will mistake them for exhaustion and nothing else. “You really wanna fall asleep in the hallway again?”

“One time, Lulu. You fall asleep in the hallway _one_ time…”

She ignores his sleepy mumbling and reaches over to nudge Barry. “Get up, boys. We got a competition tomorrow and I’m not gonna get either of you a triple-shot if you don’t get up.”

Barry stirs. “Whassat boutta triple-shot?”

“Yeah, you heard me,” says Lup, tantalizingly. “Just get up.”

He stumbles to his feet, and Taako groans, yanking Kravitz’s sweatshirt over his head. At the other table, Lucretia sighs and pushes her hands through her hair, then starts loading books into her backpack. “Everyone remembers what time we’re meeting at school tomorrow?”

“Six-thirty,” Lup replies, automatically, and this time Taako’s groan is accompanied with a muffled curse.

Their president raises an eyebrow at Lup, who crooks her fingers in the _Okay_ symbol _._ Stifling a tiny yawn behind her hand, Lucretia pulls the backpack over her shoulders and hoists it up. “Fucking hell,” she says. “This may not have been a good idea.”

“You need a ride home, Luce?”

“I’ll be fine,” she mutters, even though she looks more exhausted than finals week Lucretia, who is a being of raw energy and caffeine and a force not to be reckoned with. “Is he alive?”

“Mmh,” says Magnus, from the pages of a suffocated-looking book.

Lucretia sighs again. “I’ll take him,” she says to Lup. “You just get these two home, okay?”

Lup nods and starts gathering her things. The heap of fabric formerly known as Taako reluctantly shifts and fumbles for his bag, and Barry rubs his eyes like somehow, it’ll make the dark circles disappear. His desktop is covered with PDFs and bullet-point outlines. The most recent bullet point says _Migration of cultural stigmaaaaaaaaaaaddddhsjhfjhffhfhhhhhhjkkkk99989fdhfjfj_ , which Lup guesses is around when his head hit the keyboard.

Eventually they all make it to the parking lot, although Magnus looks like he’s ready to fall asleep on the next available surface, and Taako’s braid is just about beyond repair. “Six-thirty,” Lucretia tells them, again, and very gently starts to drag Magnus to her car. Lup has to fish around in her backpack for a good thirty seconds to find the car keys, and when she finally gets them in the ignition, the engine’s roar is enough to temporarily startle her out of her research-induced stupor.

The radio plays on low during the drive back to Barry’s. Taako is asleep in the passenger seat, sunken down into Kravitz’s sweatshirt, and Barry isn’t out just yet, but if his head-nodding is any indication, it won’t be long. Lup blinks and tries not to focus on the weight tugging on her eyelashes. She pulls clumsily into Barry’s driveway, shuts the door as quietly as she can behind her, and closes her eyes against the warm night air.

She’s missed this—the liminal peace right after their late-nighters, when sleep is a thousand miles away and the competition is even further.

“Hey,” says Barry, softly, and she opens her eyes to see him at her side. “I gotta go in. I’ll see you tomorrow morning, right?”

“6:15 on the dot, babe.” Lup grins when he groans, and then, because Taako is asleep and the neighborhood is suspended in a dream, she leans in and presses her lips to his. Barry stiffens and then relaxes just as suddenly. He feels like home, and even when she pulls away, they’re standing close enough to be each other’s center of gravity.

That's how it's always been, isn't it? They keep each other grounded.

“ ’Night, Bear,” she says, and adjusts his glasses as he’s trying to compose himself. It’s very, very adorable. “Get some rest for me, okay?”

“You too,” says Barry. He’s still sounding a little dazed, and almost walks into the rearview mirror as he heads up the driveway, sending Lup headlong into a small fit of giggles. She catches her breath and blows him a kiss when he reaches the door.

When she climbs back up behind the steering wheel, Taako yawns and slumps in her direction.

“Hey,” he says, drowsily. “You good?”

* * *

_“Can I make you a promise?” she says._

_“I don’t like those.”_

_“I know you don’t, but let me make just one. Okay? You trust me, right?”_

_“Fine. Okay. What’s the promise?”_

_“I promise we’ll be okay,” she says. “Wherever we go, we’re gonna be okay.”_

* * *

“I dunno,” says Lup. “But I think I will be.”

He nods—that’s evidently enough for him—and lets his head knock back against the windowsill. Lup puts the car in reverse and backs them onto the street. She sings quietly along with the radio as she drives them home.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on tumblr @lichlesbian and on twitter @rosegilded!


End file.
